Malaysia.

Everything starts with the rempah. Shallots, garlic, dried and fresh chiles, lemongrass, galangal, fresh turmeric and often candlenut go into a stone mortar or a blender and come out as a coarse wet paste. That paste is then fried patiently in oil — this is the step home cooks rush and regret — until it darkens, stops smelling raw and green, and the oil separates back out around the edges in a red slick called pecah minyak, "broken oil". A rendang, a laksa, an ayam percik and a fish curry can all begin from the same handful of ingredients; what separates them is the ratio, the additions, and how long the paste is fried.

The second pillar is belacan, a dense block of shrimp fermented and pressed into cakes. Raw it smells aggressive; toasted over a flame or dry-fried until it crumbles, it turns nutty and savoury and disappears into sambal, laksa broth and vegetable dishes. Alongside it sit tamarind (asam) for sour edge, gula melaka — palm sugar tapped from coconut flower stems, sold in dark cylinders — for a smoky caramel sweetness that white sugar cannot imitate, and coconut milk in two grades: the thick first press for richness, the thin second press for volume.

The Chinese kitchen contributes technique rather than seasoning. Char kway teow, hokkien mee and wonton noodles depend on wok hei, the scorched, faintly smoky aroma a screaming-hot carbon steel wok imparts in seconds. Soy sauce, dark and light, oyster sauce and lard belong to this side of the map, and the great Chinese-Malaysian dishes are almost all noodles cooked to order by a single cook at a single burner.

Indian-Muslim cooks — the mamak — run the country's all-night stalls, and their repertoire is its own genre: roti canai stretched and flipped to order, teh tarik pulled between two cups until foamy, mee goreng fried with tomato sauce and tofu puffs, nasi kandar rice buried under ladles of several curries at once. Tamil Malaysian cooking adds banana-leaf rice, rasam, curry leaves and mustard seed tempering.

Regional lines are real. The east coast states of Kelantan and Terengganu cook sweeter, with more coconut and grilled fish. Penang is the sour-and-pungent capital, home of asam laksa and the best hawker street in the country. Malacca and Penang share Nyonya cooking, the Peranakan tradition of Chinese families who adopted Malay ingredients. Across the sea in Sarawak and Sabah, indigenous Iban, Bidayuh and Kadazan kitchens cook with bamboo, jungle ferns and rice wine, and Sarawak laksa tastes nothing like the peninsula's.