Nigeria.

The pepper base is the grammar of the whole cuisine. Nigerians blend fresh red tatashe (bell peppers) with ata rodo (scotch bonnets), onion and often tomato, then boil the purée down and fry it in oil for far longer than a European cook would think reasonable — fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty minutes — until the raw tomato smell disappears, the colour deepens from bright red to brick, and the oil separates and floats in a visible ring on top. That ring is the doneness signal. Stop early and everything downstream tastes thin and sour; take it all the way and a pot of rice, a stew or a pan of greens can be built on it in minutes.

The second structural idea is the pairing of soup and swallow. Nigerian "soup" is not a bowl you drink from — it is a thick, oily, intensely seasoned stew of greens, seeds, meat and fish, and it is never eaten alone. Opposite it sits swallow: pounded yam, eba made from cassava garri, amala from yam flour, fufu, or semolina, worked into a smooth elastic mound. You pinch off a piece with the right hand, press a dent into it, use it as a scoop, and swallow without much chewing so the soup does the tasting. Which soup goes with which swallow is a matter of household habit and regional loyalty, and people are firm about it.

Seasoning comes from a pantry of dried and fermented things rather than from a spice rack. Iru or dawadawa, fermented locust beans, adds a pungent, almost cheesy funk to Yoruba and northern cooking. Ground crayfish — dried shrimp, milled to a powder — goes into nearly every southern pot. Stockfish and smoked catfish add slow-released savouriness, ogiri brings sharper fermentation, and aromatic seeds and leaves such as uziza, uda, ehu, utazi and scent leaf carry the regional signatures. Bouillon cubes are also genuinely part of the modern canon, not a shortcut cooks are embarrassed about; most Nigerian kitchens use them alongside everything above.

The map divides roughly at the palm line. The forested south cooks in red palm oil and leans on yam, cassava, plantain, seafood and leafy greens, giving Yoruba efo riro, Igbo bitterleaf soup and nkwobi, and the Niger Delta banga and afang soups built around palm fruit and periwinkles. The drier north cooks in groundnut oil, eats millet, sorghum and rice, and turns them into tuwo eaten with soups thickened by baobab leaf or okra. Northern food is also the source of the country's most exported dish, suya, and of dairy traditions — nono and fura — that barely exist further south.

Finally there is party food, which in Nigeria is a category in its own right. An owambe celebration means enormous pots cooked outdoors over firewood, jollof rice with a deliberately smoky bottom layer, fried plantain, moi moi, peppered meat and trays of small chops handed round while the cooking is still going. Much of what the world recognises as Nigerian food — jollof, puff puff, suya, chin chin — travelled outward from exactly that setting.