North Macedonia.

The pantry is short, seasonal and heavily preserved. Peppers dominate it: kurtovska kapija for ajvar, long green ones for stuffing, hot ones dried on strings, and paprika used by the tablespoon rather than the pinch. Beans come second, above all the tetovec, a large flat white bean from the Polog valley that cooks to a creamy interior without dissolving. Dairy is sheep-led and mostly white — sirenje, the brined cheese crumbled over almost everything, and bieno sirenje, the beaten cheese of Mariovo kneaded by hand until it turns dense and elastic — with kashkaval, the firm yellow cheese, kept for melting over meat. Sunflower oil does the frying, dried mint and black pepper do most of the seasoning, and tarana, coarse pasta crumbs rubbed by hand and dried in the sun, sits in sacks as insurance against a thin week.

Technique is built around two vessels and one habit. The tava is a wide shallow pan; the gjuveče is a small lidded clay pot; and the habit is the long unattended bake in falling heat, inherited from an era when villages shared a bread oven rather than owning one. Turli tava works exactly that way, with aubergine, okra, beans and peppers left to collapse into one another rather than roasted to a firm edge, and selsko meso does the same in miniature, one pot per person, sealed under melting kashkaval. Almost everything begins with onion fried in oil until soft, then paprika added off the heat so it blooms without burning — the single most recognisable Macedonian flavour.

Much of the repertoire is honestly shared. Ajvar, sarma, burek, shopska salad and grilled kebapi belong to the whole region, and no useful purpose is served by claiming otherwise. What is genuinely local is narrower and more interesting: pastrmajlija, the boat-shaped bread of Štip loaded with cured pork and finished with an egg; tavče gravče, which other Balkan countries make in some form but nobody else treats as a national emblem; malidžano, the walnut-and-aubergine spread; and the freshwater cooking of Lake Ohrid, where the endemic Ohrid trout — long overfished and now tightly protected — is prized above any sea fish.

Drink is taken as seriously as food. The Tikveš basin around Kavadarci and Negotino is one of the largest wine regions in southeastern Europe, planted mostly with vranec, a black, tannic red, and the aromatic white temjanika. Alongside it sits grape rakija and, distinctively, mastika — a strong anise spirit associated with Ohrid and Skopje that clouds with water and is drunk cold with meze. Coffee is Turkish more often than not, and boza, the thick fermented millet drink, is still sold in the Old Bazaar in Skopje.

The country's communities cook differently within the same market. Albanian households in Tetovo, Gostivar and Debar lean on pies, peppers and lamb, and avoid pork entirely; Turkish families in the bazaar quarters keep the syrup-sweet end of the repertoire alive with baklava, tulumbi and sutlijaš; and the Vlach town of Kruševo is known for pastry and for lokum made in the same handful of workshops for generations.