Ecuador.

Almost every savory Ecuadorian pot starts with a refrito: onion, garlic and often tomato or bell pepper softened in oil colored with achiote, seasoned with cumin and a little oregano. The seeds are steeped in warm oil until it turns orange, then strained out — that oil is the country's base note, and it explains why so many dishes share the same warm terracotta color without sharing a flavor. Ecuadorian cooks generally stop the refrito before it browns, so the finished dish tastes sweet and rounded rather than caramelized.

In the Sierra, corn and potato do the structural work that wheat does elsewhere. Andean corn has huge starchy kernels, and it appears boiled as mote, toasted as tostado, and popped as canguil — the popcorn that lands on top of soups and seafood. Potatoes are treated as a thickener as much as a vegetable: floury varieties are cooked until they disintegrate into milk, giving highland soups their body without cream or flour. Fresh cheese, curdled that morning and barely salted, is crumbled into those soups off the heat, where it softens but never fully melts.

The coast runs on a different starch entirely. Green plantain is boiled, fried, mashed, re-fried and pounded flat, turning up at breakfast as a stuffed ball, at lunch as a mash, and beside everything as thin salted chips called chifles. Peanuts are ground into sauces rather than eaten as a snack, coconut milk carries the Afro-Ecuadorian cooking of Esmeraldas, and lime does what vinegar does in Europe — cures onion, tightens fish, lifts a heavy sauce.

The daily rhythm is set by almuerzo, the fixed-price midday meal served in every town. It arrives in a set order: a juice, then a soup, then a plate of rice with a stew or a fried protein and a small salad, sometimes a spoonful of something sweet to close. Ecuadorians eat their main meal at midday and something much lighter in the evening, often the same plantain-and-cheese food they had for breakfast.

Regional identity shows up most clearly at festivals. Colada morada and guagua de pan mark the Day of the Dead in the highlands; fanesca, a fifteen-legume soup with salt cod, appears only in Holy Week; hornado and cuy anchor Sunday markets in Cuenca and Ambato. On the coast the calendar matters less than the hour — encebollado is a morning dish, ceviche belongs to late morning and early afternoon, and ordering either at dinner marks you as a visitor.