Mexico.

Everything starts with corn and the ancient alkaline process called nixtamalization: dried kernels simmered and steeped with slaked lime, which loosens the hulls, unlocks niacin, and creates the aroma that defines masa. Fresh masa pressed and cooked on a comal becomes the tortilla — the plate, utensil and bread of the entire cuisine. A taco is simply the tortilla doing its job.

Dried chiles are the second pillar, and they function like a spice cabinet: fruity ancho, tangy bright guajillo, fiery árbol, smoky chipotle (a dried, smoked jalapeño). Toasted, soaked and blended, they form adobos and the great mole sauces. Fresh chiles — jalapeño, serrano, poblano, habanero — play a different role, bringing grassy heat and crunch to salsas. Every serious kitchen keeps both kinds and does not treat them as interchangeable.

Technique revolves around fire and patience. Charring on a comal — tomatoes, onions, garlic, chiles blistered until blackened in spots — is the signature move behind salsa depth. Slow cooking rules the celebratory dishes: barbacoa in pit ovens, cochinita pibil wrapped in banana leaves, carnitas confited in lard. The vertical trompo spit of tacos al pastor, adapted from Lebanese immigrants' shawarma in the twentieth century, is proof the cuisine keeps absorbing and transforming outside influences.

Beans simmered with little more than onion and salt (frijoles de olla) accompany almost everything, mashed and refried the next day. Rice arrived with the Spanish and settled in as sopa seca. Lime and salt are the universal finishers; crema, queso fresco and pickled onions the standard toppings. Street food is not a lesser tier of the cuisine but its proving ground — the taquería, the torta stand and the tamal cart are where regional styles compete and evolve nightly.

The herb-and-garnish layer deserves its own mention, because it is applied with more precision than outsiders notice: cilantro and finely chopped white onion on tacos, never yellow onion and never cheese on a street taco; epazote simmered into black beans; hoja santa wrapping fish in the south. Avocado appears as guacamole at the table, or simply sliced with salt. And the drinks are part of the food culture — agua frescas of hibiscus and tamarind, chocolate whisked with cinnamon, and mezcal treated with the reverence other countries give wine.