Haiti.

Everything starts with epis (sometimes written zepis). Blitzed from flat-leaf parsley, scallions, thyme, garlic, green bell pepper, onion, a little Scotch bonnet, oil and sour orange or lime juice, it is not a sauce but a seasoning paste — the first thing a Haitian cook reaches for and the reason two households making the same stew taste different. A jar keeps a couple of weeks refrigerated and freezes well in ice-cube trays, and getting your own epis right does more for Haitian food than any single recipe.

The second pillar is sour citrus and the wash that precedes cooking. Meat and fish are scrubbed with sour orange, lime or vinegar before they ever touch seasoning — a habit that reads as fussy from outside and is non-negotiable inside. What it actually does is strip the surface, tighten the flesh and leave a citric edge that survives frying. Sour orange (zoranj si) is the ideal; a blend of orange juice with extra lime is the standard substitute abroad.

Technique divides broadly into three families. Twice-cooked meats — griyo from pork, tasso from goat or beef — are braised in their marinade until tender, dried, and then fried hard. Long-mashed stews, above all legim, cook vegetables for hours until they collapse into a thick, glossy purée that clings to rice. And fried things — akra from grated malanga, marinad batter fritters, bannann peze — belong to the street, sold hot from oil drums and eaten standing up with pikliz spooned over the top.

Rice is the daily plate, usually diri kole ak pwa (rice cooked with beans in their own dark cooking liquor) or, for occasions, diri djon djon — rice steeped in the black liquor of tiny dried mushrooms that grow in the north. Alongside rice comes sos pwa, a thin, silky bean sauce poured over the top, and some kind of stewed meat or fish. Cornmeal (mayi moulen) and boiled ground provisions — yam, taro, breadfruit, plantain — carry the meal where rice is expensive.

Regional and seasonal difference is real but quieter than in larger countries. The north around Cap-Haïtien claims djon djon; the Artibonite valley grows the country's rice; the coasts eat more fish, conch (lambi) and crab, which turns up inside legim. Sweets lean on coconut, cane sugar, evaporated milk and warm spice — pen patat, dous makos, tablèt — and the drinks canon runs from kremas at Christmas to clairin, the raw sugarcane spirit, and Barbancourt rum, which has been made in Haiti since the nineteenth century.