Pakistan.

Four fats do almost all the work. Ghee and desi butter carry the sweets and the festival cooking, mustard oil gives Punjabi village food its sinus-clearing sharpness, rendered beef or lamb fat is what makes chapli kebab and nihari taste like the bazaar, and neutral oil handles the daily pot. Whole spices go into the fat first — cumin, black cardamom, cassia, cloves, black peppercorns — and ground spice comes later, once there is moisture to protect it. Yogurt is the great tenderiser and souring agent, whisked before it goes into a hot pan so it does not split. Dried souring agents matter as much as fresh: dried plums (aloo bukhara) in Sindhi rice, dried pomegranate seed (anardana) in Pashtun kebabs, tamarind in chaat, and lemon squeezed over almost everything at the moment of eating.

The named techniques are worth learning because they recur everywhere. Bhunai is the hard, active frying of the masala described above. Dum is sealing a pot — traditionally with a rope of dough around the rim — and letting steam finish the food with nothing escaping; it is how biryani, and much of the country's festive cooking, is completed. Baghar or tarka is a final sizzle of spice in hot fat poured over a finished dish. Karahi cooking is the opposite of slow: a wok-shaped iron pan, very high heat, tomatoes and meat and almost no water, done in twenty minutes. And the tandoor, a clay pit oven, still sits at the front of nearly every neighbourhood bakery, turning out naan and roti that home ovens can only approximate.

Meals are structured around bread or rice with one main pot, rather than around courses. A typical dinner is a salan (gravy dish) with roti, a bowl of yogurt or raita, sliced onion with lemon, and green chile on the side. Rice dishes — biryani, pulao — are the exception that stands alone, needing only raita and a salad. Lentils and vegetables appear constantly but usually as company for meat rather than as the centre, which is the clearest daily difference from the vegetarian traditions of neighbouring India.

Regional lines are drawn by climate and by who ruled where. Punjab cooks with dairy, wheat and mustard greens, and it gave the country its butter-and-cream restaurant dishes. Sindh, and Karachi in particular, absorbed the Urdu-speaking migrants of 1947, whose Delhi and Lucknow kitchens brought nihari, haleem and the aggressively spiced Karachi biryani that is now the national obsession. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa eats the plainest and arguably the best meat in the country — salt, fat, fire and very little else. Balochistan roasts whole animals beside open flame, and along the coast at Gwadar adds fish and dates to the picture.

Sweets follow a different logic from the savoury food: milk reduced for hours, semolina fried in ghee, sugar syrup, and perfume from cardamom, kewra, rose and saffron rather than from spice heat. Chai — strong black tea boiled with milk and sugar — punctuates the entire day, and the pink, salted kashmiri chai of the north is a genuinely separate drink that surprises first-time visitors.