Austria.

The engine of the Viennese kitchen is beef, and specifically beef in water. Rindsuppe — clear beef broth built from shank, marrow bones and root vegetables — is the base of an entire category of soups served with something floating in them: sliced pancakes (Frittaten), semolina dumplings, liver dumplings, filled pasta. Boiling beef is taken seriously enough that Viennese butchers still sell more than a dozen individually named simmering cuts, of which Tafelspitz is only the most famous. The broth is not stock in the background sense; it is a course of its own, served before the meat it was made from.

The second pillar is frying in fat. The Austrian breading method — flour, egg, loose dry breadcrumbs, no pressing — is designed to produce a coat that separates from the meat and blisters into a dry, wavy shell rather than clinging like a batter. It needs depth of fat and a pan that is moved constantly, and it is applied to veal (Wiener Schnitzel), chicken (Backhendl), mushrooms, cauliflower and even mozzarella-stuffed pockets. Getting it right is the local test of a competent cook, and it is the reason clarified butter and lard have never left Austrian kitchens.

Third comes flour and dairy in their sweet form. Mehlspeisen — Kaiserschmarrn, Palatschinken, Germknödel, strudel, Buchteln, Salzburger Nockerl — occupy a place that has no clean equivalent elsewhere: they can be dessert, but they can equally be lunch. Alongside them sits the Konditorei tradition of layered tortes and glazes that grew up with the coffee house, where Sachertorte, Esterházytorte and Cremeschnitte are eaten in the afternoon with black coffee and unsweetened whipped cream.

Regionally the country splits along its landscape. The alpine west lives on cheese, cured pork, dumplings and thick soups. Carinthia and Styria in the south lean towards curd cheese fillings, corn, pumpkin seed oil and a distinctly Slovenian-Italian accent. Lower Austria and Burgenland grow the wine, apricots and paprika, and the Danube supplies carp and the Wachau valley its stone fruit. Vienna itself is not so much a region as a collecting point where all of it was rewritten for restaurant service.

Seasoning stays deliberately narrow: salt, black pepper, caraway, marjoram, sweet paprika, bay, lovage, horseradish, vinegar and lemon do almost all the work. Sourness is the counterweight to fat — vinegar in the potato salad, lemon on the schnitzel, apple and horseradish beside the boiled beef, sauerkraut with pork — and once you notice that pairing, most of the menu explains itself.