Finland.

Rye is the spine of the whole cuisine, and it behaves nothing like wheat. Finnish rye is baked as a dense wholegrain sourdough with a flavour closer to sour beer than to bread, and Finns eat more of it per head than almost anyone in Europe. The same flour also builds pastry: the thin shells of Karelian pies, the thick armour-like crust of a kalakukko, the coating on fried Baltic herring. Rye dough is worked cold, handled quickly and never kneaded to elasticity — there is little gluten to develop, so the technique is pressing and patting rather than stretching.

Fat means butter, and dairy runs through everything. Beyond butter and cream there is a whole shelf of soured products with no clean English translation: piimä, a thin drinking buttermilk poured at lunch; viili, a stretchy ropey yoghurt eaten with cinnamon; rahka, the quark that binds berry pies; kermaviili, the soured cream stirred into soup off the heat. Leipäjuusto, a fresh curd cheese grilled until it blisters and squeaks, is dairy pushed as far as it will go. Finns also cook with milk directly — mashed potato, porridges and fish soups are milk-based rather than stock-based more often than visitors expect.

Protein comes from water and forest before it comes from farms. Salmon, Baltic herring, vendace, perch, pike and whitefish are smoked, salted, fried, soured or simmered; reindeer, elk and hare belong to the north and to autumn; pork is the everyday meat, usually braised or roasted rather than grilled. Around all of it sits the forest harvest, which is genuinely everyday rather than romantic: lingonberries turned into a tart, barely sweetened compote that goes beside meat the way mustard does elsewhere, bilberries baked into tray pies, cloudberries hoarded for cheese, chanterelles fried in butter and cream.

The rhythm of the day is unusually fixed. Lunch is the hot meal, served early and often as a single plate with a glass of milk or piimä, a wedge of rye bread and butter, and a raw grated salad on the side. Dinner at home is lighter. Between and around them sits coffee — Finland drinks more per person than any country on earth — and coffee is not taken alone: it comes with pulla, the cardamom-scented sweet dough that becomes korvapuusti buns, and on any occasion worth marking, with several cakes.

Regionally the country splits east from west. The east — Karelia and Savonia — is the land of rye pastry, oven stews cooked overnight in the residual heat of a bread oven, and fish baked inside bread. The west and the southwest coast look toward Sweden: more butter and cream sauces, more Baltic herring, more archipelago bread sweetened with malt. The far north is its own kitchen entirely, built on reindeer, cloudberries and dried fish. And a very Finnish category cuts across all of them: sauna food, the beer, sausage and salted fish eaten in a towel while the stove cools.