Colombia.

Almost every savory dish in the highlands and the interior starts from hogao — also called guiso — a slow sofrito of chopped tomato and cebolla larga (a fat, mild scallion), softened in oil with garlic and cumin until the tomato collapses and the mixture turns thick and orange. It is not a sauce so much as a seasoning system: it goes under braises, into empanada filling, over patacones, and beside beans. Cumin is the country's defining spice, used with a heavier hand than in most of Latin America, and achiote or a packaged color powder supplies the yellow-orange tint that Colombians expect a stew to have.

The starch on the plate is rarely just one thing. A single lunch can carry white rice, a boiled potato, a piece of cassava and a fried plantain without anyone considering it excessive, because each has a different job — rice absorbs, potato thickens, cassava goes dense and slightly fibrous, plantain adds sweetness or crunch depending on ripeness. Corn works in two directions: as masarepa, precooked corn flour that becomes arepas, and as whole cobs dropped into soups and sancochos. Panela, unrefined cane sugar sold in hard blocks, sweetens coffee, desserts and the everyday drink aguapanela.

Regionally the country splits hard. Antioquia and the coffee-growing departments eat the heaviest food in Colombia: beans cooked with pork, chicharrón, chorizo, and the arepa paisa, thin and unsalted, treated as an edible napkin. The Cundiboyacense highlands around Bogotá sit at 2,600 metres and cook accordingly — potato soups, wheat bread, milk, cream and fresh cheese, dishes like ajiaco and changua that would make no sense in the heat below.

The two coasts are different countries again. The Caribbean side cooks with coconut milk, fries whole fish, sours everything with lime and suero costeño, and eats a salty crumbling cheese with almost everything sweet. The Pacific coast of Chocó, overwhelmingly Afro-Colombian and largely cut off by road, uses coconut, seafood and local herbs like chillangua and poleo in a way that has almost no overlap with Andean cooking. Tolima and Huila roast lechona and steam tamales in plantain leaves; the eastern plains cook whole quarters of beef upright on stakes around an open fire.

Drinks and sweets tie it together. Fresh juice is made to order with either water or milk, from fruit — lulo, guanábana, maracuyá, tomate de árbol, mora — most of which never leaves the region. Coffee is drunk small, black and sweet, called a tinto, and the good beans historically went abroad. In Bogotá, hot chocolate arrives with a block of fresh cheese meant to be dropped in and eaten with a spoon once it goes stringy, which is either the best or the worst thing about the city depending on who you ask.