Ghana.

Start with the pepper. Almost every savoury Ghanaian dish begins with a grind of onion, fresh tomato and chili — usually scotch bonnet, sometimes the small green kpakpo shito that smells of bell pepper and bites like a wasp — with ginger and garlic worked in. Traditionally this is done in an asanka, a shallow ridged earthenware bowl, using a hardwood pestle called a ta; the ridges tear the ingredients rather than pulverising them, which is why a hand-ground base tastes coarser and brighter than a blender full of the same things. That base becomes stew for rice, the body of a soup, or the start of jollof, depending on what happens next.

Fats do a lot of the identifying work. Red palm oil, pressed from the fruit of the oil palm, gives red red and palm nut soup their colour and a heavy, faintly savoury fruitiness; heated with spices and aromatics it becomes zomi, a finishing oil. Groundnut oil and coconut oil handle the frying, and groundnut paste itself — unsweetened, unhomogenised peanut butter — is thinned into stock to build nkatenkwan, the peanut soup that pairs with fufu across the Akan-speaking south.

Salted, smoked and fermented fish carry more seasoning weight here than fresh fish does. Smoked herring and mackerel go into stews, koobi is salted tilapia, momoni is fermented and pungent, and dried shrimp is ground into powders. None of it is subtle, and that is the point: a spoonful of shito, the near-black chili and dried-fish oil that Ghanaians keep in a jar year-round, will season a plate of plain rice on its own.

The starch half of the plate splits by region and by grain. In the Akan south, cassava and unripe plantain are boiled and pounded into fufu, and rice is beaten into omo tuo balls for Sunday soup. Ga and Ewe kitchens along the coast ferment corn dough for banku and kenkey, both sour, both stirred or steamed rather than pounded. In the north, maize or millet flour is stirred into tuo zaafi and eaten with soups thickened with dried okra or baobab leaf. Yam is eaten everywhere — boiled as ampesi, fried into chips, or pounded.

Meals are not divided into courses, and vegetables rarely arrive as a separate dish. Greens are cooked into the sauce instead: kontomire, the leaf of the cocoyam plant, is steamed and ground into a thick stew with palm oil, egusi seeds and smoked fish. Garden eggs — small white and green African aubergines — are boiled and mashed into stew or blended into light soup for body. Between meals the country eats standing up: kelewele from a paper cone at dusk, roasted plantain with a handful of groundnuts, bofrot doughnuts, koko porridge with bean fritters at dawn.