Dominican Republic.

The engine of the cuisine is sazón — not the packet, but the habit. A Dominican cook keeps a jar of sofrito or a bowl of crushed garlic, oregano, onion and ají cubanela within arm's reach, and almost every savoury dish starts by meeting it. Meat is seasoned hours ahead with that paste plus sour orange or lime, and the acid is doing real work: it tenderises, it cuts the fat of pork and goat, and it gives the finished stew a brightness that survives long cooking.

The second signature technique is far more specific: browning sugar in oil until it darkens to the colour of strong tea, then dropping the meat straight into it. This is how pollo guisado and carne guisada get their mahogany colour and faint bittersweet edge, and it is the step most foreign recipes skip or fake with browning sauce. The sugar must go past golden — at golden it is merely sweet — but stop before it smokes, because burnt-bitter cannot be rescued.

Starch is not a side here, it is the architecture. Green plantain (plátano verde), yuca, yautía, ñame, auyama and sweet potato are collectively called víveres, and a Dominican market sells them by the armful. They behave differently: yuca goes translucent and fibrous at the core, yautía dissolves and thickens broth, auyama collapses entirely and is often used deliberately as a thickener in beans and sancocho. Understanding which root melts and which holds is most of what makes a good sancocho.

The plate itself is standardised to a degree that surprises visitors. La bandera — white rice, stewed red beans, stewed meat, with salad or tostones — is lunch on most days in most households, and the variation happens in the meat and the side rather than the structure. Breakfast is its own fixed set: mangú with fried cheese, fried salami and eggs, the famous tres golpes. Dinner is usually light, sometimes just coffee and bread.

Regional difference is real but subtle. The Cibao valley in the north is the agricultural heartland and the home of the heaviest, most meat-loaded sancochos; Samaná, settled partly by English-speaking freed Americans in the 1820s, cooks fish in coconut milk in a way the rest of the island does not; the arid southwest around Azua and Barahona leans on goat, which grazes on wild oregano and tastes of it; and the beaches of the east — Boca Chica above all — gave the country its fried snack culture, yaniqueques and fried fish eaten standing in the sand. Haitian, Spanish, Taíno and West African threads run through all of it: the sofrito and the olives are Iberian, the root vegetables and the cassava technique are Taíno, and the plantain pounding, the one-pot stews and the frying culture came across the Atlantic with enslaved Africans.