United Kingdom.

The centre of the tradition is dry heat and animal fat. A joint of beef, lamb or pork goes into a hot oven, is basted in its own rendered fat, comes out to rest while the fat is poured off, and the browned residue left in the tin is turned into gravy with stock and whatever wine or ale is open. Potatoes are parboiled, roughed up in the colander and roasted in that same fat until the shaggy edges shatter. Nothing in the sequence is complicated, but everything depends on timing and on temperature discipline: fat hot enough to smoke faintly before batter or potato goes near it, meat rested long enough that the juices stay in the slice instead of running onto the board.

Pudding is the other pillar, and it is far broader than dessert. Yorkshire pudding is a plain flour-egg-milk batter poured into smoking dripping, where it climbs the sides of the tin and sets hollow. Steak and kidney pudding is a suet crust lining a basin, steamed for hours until the pastry turns translucent and silky. Christmas pudding is dried fruit, suet and spirit steamed and then aged for months. Sponge puddings, treacle tarts, crumbles, trifles and custards all belong to the same family: cheap starch and dairy transformed by long, gentle, moist heat.

Fish is treated two ways — fried fresh, or cured with smoke. The chip shop batter and the deep fryer arrived with industrial cities and the railway, which put North Sea trawler fish in inland markets overnight. Alongside it sits an older curing tradition: Finnan and Arbroath haddock in the north-east of Scotland, Craster kippers in Northumberland, smoked eel and potted shrimp in the fens and Morecambe Bay. Smoked haddock poached in milk still underpins kedgeree, fish pie and Cullen skink.

Dairy and baking carry the rest of the table. Britain and Ireland make several hundred territorial cheeses — Cheddar, Cheshire, Lancashire, Stilton, Caerphilly, Wensleydale — and cheese is eaten as a course with oatcakes, pickle and celery rather than dissolved into sauces. Baking runs from Scottish oatcakes and bannocks to Welsh bara brith, Cornish saffron buns, Chelsea buns, scones and shortbread, most of it built on butter, dried fruit and a light hand.

What holds the modern kitchen together is the pub and the curry house. Pub food formalised the pie, the pasty, the ploughman's and the Sunday roast as things you eat out. From the 1960s onwards, restaurants opened largely by Sylheti Bangladeshi families created a British-Indian repertoire — balti, tikka masala, jalfrezi, the Friday-night takeaway — that no longer maps onto any single region of South Asia because it stopped being an import and became a domestic cuisine.