Ukraine.

Start with the fat, because it explains the rest. Salo — salt-cured pork back fat — is the historical cooking medium, the winter calorie bank and a national in-joke all at once, rendered into cracklings (shkvarky) that finish potatoes, dumplings and porridge, or pounded in a mortar with garlic and stirred into a pot of borscht at the end as an enrichment called zaprazhka. Alongside it stands sunflower oil, unrefined and dark gold, with a toasted seed aroma that is unmistakable in a salad of tomatoes and onion. Ukraine grows more sunflowers than anywhere else on earth, and cold-pressed sunflower oil is used here the way olive oil is used around the Mediterranean.

The second pillar is sourness. Sauerkraut, brine-pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, sour apples, kvas made from rye bread, and above all smetana — thick cultured sour cream — appear at almost every meal. Sour cream is not a garnish in Ukraine; it is an ingredient. It goes into dumpling dough, into cake batter, into the cornmeal porridge of the Carpathians, and it lands on the table in a bowl with a spoon so that everyone adjusts their own plate. In borscht, acidity is also technical: without an acid the beetroot turns brown and the soup loses its ruby colour, so cooks add vinegar, beet kvas, tomato or sour apple deliberately.

The technique that shapes so many dishes is the zasmazhka (also called zazharka): onion, carrot and often beetroot or tomato paste cooked slowly in fat until sweet and jammy, then stirred into a soup or stew near the end rather than at the beginning. It is a flavour bomb added late, and it is why a Ukrainian soup can taste long-cooked without having simmered all day. The other constant is the dough tradition — varenyky, halushky dumplings, pyrizhky buns, pampushky rolls, and the enormous seasonal breads that mark weddings and holidays. Wheat here is cultural, not just agricultural.

Regional differences are real. The Carpathian west cooks with corn, sheep cheese and forest mushrooms, and shares a border-blurred repertoire with Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Poland. The centre and Poltava region are dumpling and salo country. Odesa and the Black Sea south are the loudest, most mixed kitchen in the country, with Greek, Jewish, Bulgarian and Moldovan layers and a taste for small fried fish. Crimean Tatar cooking brings lamb, layered pastries and chebureky to the same national table.

Finally, the fasting calendar. Orthodox and Greek Catholic practice historically excluded meat, dairy and eggs for long stretches of the year, so Ukrainian cooks developed serious "postni" versions of their own classics: borscht built on mushroom or bean stock, varenyky filled with cabbage or cherries, holubtsi rolled around buckwheat. These are not modern vegan adaptations — they are the older, poorer, equally traditional half of the cuisine, and several of them are better than the rich versions.