Ireland.

No ingredient shaped Ireland more, or more painfully, than the potato. Introduced from the Americas in the late sixteenth century, it thrived in poor, wet ground and produced more calories per acre than any grain, and by the early 1800s the rural poor — squeezed onto tiny rented plots while the land around them grew grain and cattle for export — were living on it almost exclusively, often on a single high-yielding variety known as the Lumper. When potato blight arrived in 1845 and returned in the years that followed, that dependence collapsed into catastrophe: roughly a million people died of starvation and disease during An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, and around a million more emigrated, while food continued to leave Irish ports. The population fell by a quarter within a decade and kept falling for generations. Irish potato cookery — boxty, colcannon, champ, potato bread — is not quaint peasant nostalgia. It is the surviving craft of people who had to make one crop taste like many, and it is worth cooking with that in mind.

Dairy is the other pillar, and an older one. Ireland has been a cattle economy since prehistory, and milk in its many forms — fresh, soured, buttermilk, curds, butter — was the backbone of the medieval diet. The modern trace of that is everywhere: soda bread rises because the acid in buttermilk reacts with bicarbonate of soda, a discovery that arrived in the 1830s and gave a country with few ovens and little wheat gluten a bread it could bake on a griddle in under an hour. In Ulster the same dough is flattened and quartered into farls; in the south it is a round loaf slashed with a cross so the heat reaches the middle.

The pig fed the household. A cottage pig converted scraps into bacon, ham and pudding, and Irish pork cookery is overwhelmingly about cured meat rather than fresh: back rashers cut thick with a rim of fat, boiling bacon joints simmered whole, black and white pudding sliced and fried. Bacon and cabbage, not corned beef, is the actual national plate — corned beef and cabbage is an Irish-American adaptation made where beef was cheap and Irish bacon was not.

The sea is the underused wealth. The Atlantic coast yields mussels, oysters, crab, lobster, salmon and haddock, yet for centuries most of that catch was exported or eaten only near the shore, and fish carried an association with religious fasting rather than pleasure. That has changed sharply: the creamy seafood chowder now found in every west-coast pub is a genuinely modern dish, not an ancient one, and it is none the worse for it.

Since the 1970s an Irish food revival has rebuilt the cuisine around its own producers — farmhouse cheeses, artisan butter, dry-cured bacon, oysters and seaweed — with Myrtle Allen at Ballymaloe House in County Cork among its most influential figures. The result is a modern kitchen that no longer apologises for boiled bacon, brown bread and stew, but sources them properly.