Moldova.

The pantry is short and heavily preserved. Cornmeal is the everyday starch: mămăligă is beaten until it pulls away from the pot, turned out as a dome and cut with a thread rather than a knife, standing in for bread beside stews, cheese and fried eggs. Dairy divides into three things a cook keeps carefully separate — brânză de vaci, the fresh unsalted cow's curd that fills dumplings and pastries; brânză de oi, the crumbly salted sheep cheese kept in brine; and smântână, the thick soured cream that finishes almost everything hot. Sunflower oil, not butter or olive oil, is the default fat. Walnuts, plums and sour cherries come off trees in the yard, and what is not eaten in season is boiled down into bulion — homemade tomato passata sealed in jars — or dried, brined and pickled.

Sourness is the organising principle, and the Moldovan version of it is borș de tărâțe: wheat bran fermented with water and a crust of bread until it turns sharp, kept alive in a jar the way others keep a sourdough starter. It is not the beetroot soup the same word names in Ukrainian and Polish, and the distinction matters. Zeamă, the clear hen soup with hand-cut noodles, is soured at the very end, off the boil, then finished with a fistful of lovage and served scalding with sour cream and a raw chilli.

Dough work is the other household skill. Plăcinte are stretched by hand until translucent, folded around sheep cheese and dill and cooked dry in a hot pan until the surface blisters — a stovetop pastry that never needed a bread oven. Colțunași are the boiled cousin, half-moons of curd and dill lifted out the moment they float and served under melted butter and smântână. Alivenci sits between them: cornmeal, curd, eggs and dill baked in a tray until the top cracks, savoury with pepper or lightly sweetened, depending entirely on the household.

Meat is winter food and mostly pig. The December slaughter still sets the village calendar, and it produces răcitură — trotters and ears simmered half a day until the broth sets by itself, poured over picked meat with raw crushed garlic and left in the cold overnight. Garlic runs at that intensity throughout, from mujdei, pounded with salt into a sauce for grilled meat, to the head that disappears into ostropel de pui. Against all of it sits a parallel meatless cuisine, because the Orthodox fasting calendar claims a large share of the year: sarmale de post filled with mushrooms and rice, potato plăcinte, bean dishes cooked with care rather than resignation.

Wine explains more of the table than anything else. Vineyards take up a striking share of a small country, most households press their own, and the vine leaves that wrap Moldovan sarmale are a by-product — picked young in late spring, brined for the year. The honest position on the rest is that Moldova shares nearly every dish with Romania and says so; the differences are of emphasis, and of the neighbours it also borrows from. The Gagauz south cooks more lamb and more pastry, the Slavic left bank of the Dniester eats vareniki and salo beside mămăligă, and the Soviet decades left mayonnaise salads that now appear on holiday tables without anyone calling them foreign.