Australia.

The barbecue is the organising technique, and it is not what most of the world pictures. An Australian barbie is usually a flat steel plate rather than an open grill, heated hard, wiped with oil, and loaded with sausages, lamb chops, onions, butterflied prawns and slabs of fish. Nothing is smoked low and slow; the point is fast contact heat, a crust, and food off the plate and into a slice of bread or onto a plate of salad within minutes. Because Christmas falls in high summer, the traditional roast has quietly lost ground to cold prawns, oysters, glazed ham and pavlova eaten in the shade, and the seafood counters of Sydney and Melbourne trade around the clock in the days before December 25.

Seafood defines the coastline, which is where nearly everyone lives. Sydney rock oysters and Pacific oysters are eaten raw with lemon and nothing else, king prawns are bought green (raw) and grilled the same day, barramundi is the default white fish, and Moreton Bay bugs, mud crabs and scallops mark the tropical north. At a suburban fish and chip shop the standard order is flake — shark — battered and salted, with chips and a potato scallop, wrapped in paper and eaten on a seawall.

Meat and pastry carry the everyday canon. Australia eats an enormous quantity of lamb, sold as chops, racks and legs for Sunday roasts, and beef mince turns up in rissoles, spaghetti bolognese and, above all, in pies. The hand-sized meat pie and its cousin the sausage roll are sold in every bakery, service station and sporting ground in the country, and arguing about which regional bakery makes the best one is a durable national sport. Pub kitchens run on the chicken parmigiana, the schnitzel and the steak with chips and salad.

Baking follows a Country Women's Association lineage that runs on golden syrup, desiccated coconut, self-raising flour and condensed milk — lamingtons, ANZAC biscuits, caramel slice, sponge with cream, and pavlova, whose origin is genuinely contested between Australia and New Zealand and has never been settled. Children's parties still run on fairy bread: white bread, butter, hundreds and thousands.

Finally, the two forces reshaping the cuisine now. One is café culture — Australia and New Zealand gave the world the flat white and the modern brunch menu, and espresso standards in a random Melbourne side street embarrass most capital cities. The other is the migrant kitchen turned mainstream: salt and pepper squid, dim sims, Chiko rolls and banh mi are Australian food by adoption, while a serious revival of native ingredients — finger lime, saltbush, wattleseed, Davidson plum — is pushing restaurant cooking somewhere the colonial kitchen never went.