Panama.

The pantry is tropical and short. White rice is eaten twice a day and cooked in more than one register: rinsed hard and steamed dry for arroz con guandú y coco, or left unrinsed and stirred deliberately into starchy collapse for guacho, the soupy rice that thickens itself. Corn arrives as fresh masa rather than as dried tortillas — Panamanian tortillas de maíz are thick, fried and chewy, nothing like the thin Mexican kind — and it becomes bollos boiled in leaves, chicheme drunk cold, and the achiote-stained masa of tamales. Roots matter as much as grain: yuca boiled and mashed into carimañola dough, ñame breaking down at the edges to give sancocho its cloudy body, otoe and plantain going into everything from soup to patacones.

The seasoning base is a sofrito of onion, garlic and green pepper stained orange with achiote, and it starts more dishes than not. Beyond that the list is genuinely narrow: culantro, oregano, cumin in small doses, lime at the finish, and the Spanish colonial trio of olives, capers and raisins that turns up in tamal fillings and stewed chicken. Panamanians season for depth rather than heat, which is the honest difference between this kitchen and its Central American neighbours — there is no salsa culture here of the Mexican sort, and nothing like the Guatemalan reliance on toasted seeds and dried chiles.

The Caribbean coast is a separate cuisine sitting inside the same country. In Colón and Bocas del Toro, communities descended from West Indian canal and railway workers cook with coconut milk as a default liquid, and the vocabulary changes with it — rondón, saus, coconut bread, fish stewed in coconut and scotch bonnet. Inland, on the Pacific side and through the interior provinces, the cooking is drier, beefier and plainer, built on stewing hens, salted pork and whatever the farm produced.

Meals follow the Spanish-American shape. Breakfast is fried and bought hot from a fonda: hojaldras, carimañolas, empanadas and tortillas in a glass case by the door, with white cheese and coffee. Lunch is the real meal — white rice, a stew such as ropa vieja, a spoon of beans or lentils, and patacones or fried ripe plantain. Sunday and holiday food is where the effort goes: sancocho de gallina in a huge pot, tamales wrapped in bijao leaves by several generations at once, and arroz con guandú y coco, which is Christmas rice above all else. Chinese-Panamanian food is not a novelty either; arroz frito and chow mein are ordinary neighbourhood dinners in Panama City, and nobody treats them as foreign.