Bolivia.

Three chillies do most of the flavour work. Ají amarillo is the yellow-orange one, fruity and only moderately hot, and it gives dishes like fricasé their colour and their thick body. Ají colorado, the dried red chilli, brings a deeper, almost raisiny background used in stews and in the fillings of baked pastries. Locoto is the outlier: a thick-walled, seriously hot chilli eaten raw rather than cooked, and the reason a Bolivian table always has a bowl of something fierce on it. In all three cases the chilli is soaked and ground to a paste, then fried in fat until the oil at the edge of the pan turns orange — that separation is the standard doneness signal for a Bolivian base, the same way it is in the Andes generally.

The potato is not an ingredient here so much as a family. Bolivia sits inside the crop's original homeland, and markets sell dozens of native varieties by name, colour and cooking behaviour. More striking is what the Altiplano does to them: potatoes are left out overnight in the freezing dry air, trodden underfoot to press out the water, then dried in the sun, producing black chuño and pale, washed tunta. It is freeze-drying invented centuries before the machine, it keeps for years, and the rehydrated result is chewy and absorbent in a way fresh potato never is — it exists to soak up broth.

Maize matters almost as much. Choclo, the big-kernelled Andean corn, is starchy rather than sweet and behaves quite differently from supermarket sweetcorn, which is why grated-corn dishes here taste savoury and mealy rather than sugary. Mote is hulled hominy, boiled and served in the bowl alongside meat instead of being mashed into anything. Purple maize is cooked down into api, the hot breakfast drink of highland markets, and quinoa and cañahua come off the same cold plains as the potatoes.

The east is a separate kitchen. Around Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando the staples are rice, cassava, plantain and charque — beef salted and sun-dried for keeping — with urucú, the same annatto seed used across lowland South America, colouring the fat orange. Cheese is baked into starch rather than melted over it, which is where cuñapé and sonso come from. This food has more in common with the border kitchens of Brazil and Paraguay than with anything cooked in La Paz.

Structure and time complete the picture. Lunch is the serious meal, and it comes in two acts: a soup, then a segundo of meat with rice and potato. Salteñas are a mid-morning interruption, api is drunk at market stalls before dawn light is properly up, and platters like pique macho exist to be attacked communally with several forks. Underneath all of it is the altitude: at 3,600 metres water boils at roughly 88 °C, so hominy and tough cuts need hours rather than minutes, pressure cookers are ordinary domestic equipment, and bakers work doughs slightly wetter because the dry thin air pulls moisture out faster than they are used to at sea level.