Costa Rica.

The engine of almost every savoury dish is the same aromatic base Ticos simply call olor — literally "smell". It is onion, sweet red pepper, garlic, celery and coriander, sometimes with a leaf of culantro coyote (a long-leaf relative of coriander with a far stronger perfume), chopped fine and softened in oil until translucent and fragrant. Restaurants and home cooks buy it pre-chopped in bags. Add achiote for colour, and you have the flavour signature of gallo pinto, picadillos, arroz con pollo and half the country's stews. Chile is almost absent: a bottle of pickled chile panameño sits on the table for the few who want it, and the cooking itself stays mild.

Rice and black beans are the structural constants. Rice is cooked dry and separate, grain by grain, usually with a little garlic and oil. Beans are simmered soft with onion and coriander and served either drained on the plate or soupy in their own broth. Combine yesterday's rice with today's beans in a hot pan and you get gallo pinto, eaten at breakfast across every social class. What separates Costa Rican beans from Nicaraguan ones is the finish: Lizano goes into the Tico pan, giving the mix a faintly sweet, cumin-and-vegetable tang that Nicaraguans, who use red beans and no Lizano, consider a corruption. The rivalry over who invented gallo pinto is real and unresolved.

The root vegetables are the part visitors underestimate. Yuca (cassava), chayote, tiquisque, ñampí, camote and green plantain are boiled, fried, mashed and stewed constantly. Olla de carne — beef simmered until the broth is deep and gelatinous, with each root added at its own moment so nothing collapses — is the Sunday expression of this. Green plantain becomes patacones, ripe plantain becomes the sweet fried maduros that sit beside almost every lunch, and chayote gets diced into picadillo so fine it can be scooped into a warm tortilla.

Meat is used in modest quantity and long cooking. Pork shoulder becomes chicharrón; beef shin and ribs go into the pot; chicken is shredded through rice. Fish is a coastal story rather than a national one — ceviche of corvina, cured in lime with sweet pepper and mountains of coriander, is milder and finer-diced than its Peruvian cousin and is eaten with soda crackers rather than sweet potato.

Regional difference is smaller than in Mexico or Guatemala, but it exists. The Central Valley sets the national standard — casados, olla de carne, tamales, agua dulce. Guanacaste in the dry northwest is corn country: chorreadas, tanelas, and the fermented corn drink chicha. And the Caribbean province of Limón cooks a different cuisine altogether, brought by Afro-Caribbean workers from Jamaica in the late nineteenth century: rice and beans cooked in coconut milk, rondón (a coconut seafood stew), pan bon and Scotch bonnet heat that the rest of the country would find alarming.