Guatemala.

Everything starts with the recado, the ground sauce base that gives a Guatemalan dish its name and colour. Cooks toast the aromatics dry: pumpkin seeds (pepitoria) and sesame until they pop and smell of popcorn, dried guaque, pasa and cobanero chiles until they darken and turn fragrant without going bitter, then whole tomatoes, tomatillos, onion and unpeeled garlic on the same comal until their skins blister black. All of it goes into a blender or onto a grinding stone with a little broth, and comes out as a thick paste that is fried in fat until it darkens and the oil breaks at the edges. That frying step is the doneness signal that separates a finished sauce from a raw one, and it is the same instinct whether the cook is making pepián, hilachas, jocón or a red tamal recado.

Corn is treated with more care here than almost anywhere. Dried kernels are simmered with lime, rinsed and ground into masa; that masa becomes tortillas patted by hand and slapped onto the comal, the small steamed tamalitos that come alongside soup, the fat tamales wrapped in banana leaf on weekend nights, and the drinks — atoles — that are thickened with corn and drunk from a mug rather than eaten. Black beans are the daily partner: simmered whole in their broth as frijoles parados, blended and fried down into thick frijoles volteados, or sweetened with cinnamon and turned into dessert filling.

The meat is mostly chicken, pork and beef, but the technique is more interesting than the cut. Beef is boiled until it can be pulled into threads and then returned to a tomato sauce; chicken is poached and its broth becomes the liquid for the recado; turkey appears in the ceremonial Q'eqchi' soup kaq ik. Frying is done in modest amounts of oil or lard, and rich stews are almost always served over plain white rice with tortillas on the side to catch what the spoon misses.

Regional cooking splits along altitude and coastline. The western highlands around Quetzaltenango and Sololá cook with more chile and more corn, and keep the strongest Maya foundations. Cobán in the northern cloud forest grows the smoky little chile cobanero and cardamom, and makes food unlike anywhere else in the country. The Caribbean coast around Livingston belongs to the Garífuna, who cook with coconut milk, cassava and fish in a style with far more in common with Belize and Honduras than with Guatemala City. The Pacific lowlands lean tropical and sweet: plantain, mango, cashew fruit and seafood.

Sweetness is handled quietly. Guatemalan desserts are mostly fruit cooked in syrup with cinnamon and panela — the unrefined cane sugar sold in hard brown cones — or fried things dusted with sugar, like rellenitos and buñuelos. Dairy is limited to a few salty fresh cheeses that get crumbled over food rather than melted into it, which is why so many dishes taste rich without ever tasting creamy.