United States.

Corn is the foundation the whole country stands on. Indigenous farmers domesticated it and taught colonists to grow it, and it survives today in three main forms: whole kernels, cornmeal ground fine or coarse for cornbread and hushpuppies, and hominy — corn treated with alkali — which is dried and cracked into grits. Southern cornbread is unsweetened, poured into a screaming-hot skillet of fat, and treated as a savory bread; Northern cornbread is sweeter, cakier, and a genuinely different food. Grits are the Lowcountry breakfast starch, and the difference between instant grits and slow-cooked stone-ground grits is the difference between wallpaper paste and a bowl of creamy corn porridge worth waking up for.

Pork fat is the second foundation. Bacon, salt pork and country ham are seasoning as much as protein: chowder starts by rendering diced salt pork, greens simmer on a ham hock, cornbread bakes in bacon drippings, and breakfast sausage becomes the base of white gravy. Beside it sits dairy — buttermilk for biscuits and cornbread, heavy cream for chowder, and cheddar melted into everything from macaroni to burgers. Butter is a finishing fat in a way that would look profligate in most of Europe.

Louisiana runs on its own system entirely. Roux — flour cooked in fat until it darkens from blond to peanut butter to milk chocolate — is the base for gumbo and etouffee, and the darker it goes the nuttier and less thickening it becomes. Onto it goes the holy trinity of onion, celery and green bell pepper, the local answer to mirepoix. Creole cooking (city, French-Spanish, tomato-friendly) and Cajun cooking (country Acadian, darker roux, no tomato) are related but distinct, and Louisianans will correct you on the difference.

Regional seafood defines the coasts. New England reads clams, lobster and cod; the Chesapeake reads blue crab and Old Bay; the Gulf reads shrimp, oysters and crawfish; the Pacific Northwest reads salmon and Dungeness crab. Inland, barbecue splits along equally hard lines — Texas beef brisket with salt and pepper, Carolina whole hog with vinegar, Memphis ribs, Kansas City sweet sauce — each with partisans who consider the others a misunderstanding.

The meal structure is loose. Breakfast is the most distinctly American meal — eggs, sausage, biscuits, pancakes, and a whole savory-and-sweet plate at once. Dinner tends toward a protein with two sides rather than courses, and the potluck, the cookout and the holiday table are where the real regional cooking still lives. Restaurant food skews toward the sandwich, the burger and the diner plate; home food skews toward casseroles, skillets and slow-cooked pots that make a lot at once.