Chile.

Start with the onion, because Chilean savoury cooking usually does. Pino — the beef-and-onion mixture inside empanadas and under the corn lid of pastel de choclo — is built from roughly equal weights of finely diced onion and meat, sweated slowly with cumin, oregano and ají de color until the onion goes translucent and sweet and the pan smells of toasted spice rather than raw allium. A spoonful of flour thickens the juices so they set on cooling. The same base, loosened with stock, becomes the sauce for a dozen other dishes, and the same six seasonings turn up in cazuela, in charquicán and on the grill.

Corn is the summer axis. From January to March the markets fill with choclo, a large-kerneled starchy corn quite unlike sweetcorn, and three dishes appear on rotation: humitas, corn paste steamed in its own husks; pastel de choclo, that paste beaten with basil and baked as a lid over pino; and porotos granados, fresh shelled cranberry beans stewed with pumpkin and grated corn. All three are pre-Hispanic in structure, and all three lean on the same partnership of corn, squash and beans that anchors indigenous agriculture across the Americas.

The sea does the rest. The cold Humboldt Current runs the length of the coast and makes Chilean waters improbably productive, which is why the fish counter reads like nowhere else: congrio and merluza, machas and locos, sea urchins eaten raw with lemon and onion, picorocos — giant barnacles boiled whole — and cochayuyo, a leathery kelp sold in dried braids and simmered into stews and salads. Caldillo de congrio, machas a la parmesana and mariscal are coastal standards, while on the Chiloé archipelago the shellfish goes into a pit of hot stones for curanto.

The south holds two larders side by side. Mapuche cooking contributed merkén — ají cacho de cabra smoked, dried and ground with toasted coriander seed and salt — along with piñones, the starchy nuts of the araucaria, wild murta berries and the wheat preparations catuto and mote. German-speaking settlers who arrived in Valdivia, Osorno and the Lake District from the 1850s left kuchen, smoked sausage, beer and crudos, raw beef on bread with lemon and onion, all of which Chileans now eat as their own. Chiloé, meanwhile, grows potato varieties whose genetics matter to potato breeders worldwide, and turns them into milcao and chapaleles.

Bread and sugar close the loop. Chile eats a great deal of bread by any international measure — marraqueta with a crackling crust, soft flat hallulla — which is why the sandwich culture is so developed and why the evening meal is often not dinner at all but once: tea, bread, avocado, cheese and manjar, the local dulce de leche. Sweets run to chancaca, the unrefined cane sugar poured over sopaipillas, and to mote con huesillo, a summer drink of dried peaches and cooked wheat. On the drinks side, the Central Valley makes the wine, including Carmenère, a Bordeaux grape grown here for over a century while being mistaken for Merlot until the 1990s. Pisco, the grape brandy distilled in the Elqui and Limarí valleys, is a genuinely contested subject: Chile and Peru both produce it, both claim it, and their competing denominations of origin are recognised differently in different countries — an argument that international arbitration has not settled and that neither side treats as trivial.