Romania.

The single most Romanian flavour is sour, and it has its own vocabulary. Ciorbă means a soured soup, as distinct from supă, which is not soured; the souring agent is borș, traditionally a cloudy liquid fermented from wheat bran, and in its absence lemon juice, vinegar, sauerkraut brine, unripe grapes or fermented cabbage juice. A ciorbă is soured at the end, off the boil, and tasted repeatedly — too little and it tastes flat, too much and it tastes like a mistake. Almost every household soup follows this shape: a broth, root vegetables, a protein, a fistful of lovage or dill, and a final sharp correction.

Pork drives the savoury kitchen. The traditional December pig slaughter, Ignat, produces a year of smoked knuckle, ribs, bacon, sausages and lard, plus fresh dishes eaten immediately. Smoked pork is not an occasional ingredient here — it is the default way to season beans, cabbage and soups, contributing salt, fat and smoke in one move. Lard, not oil, is the historical cooking fat, and a spoonful of it in a bean stew tastes noticeably different from the sunflower oil most home cooks now use.

Mămăligă is the other pillar. Coarse cornmeal is rained into salted boiling water, beaten with a wooden stick called a făcăleț until it pulls away from the pot, then turned out as a single dome and cut with a thread rather than a knife. Corn arrived from the Americas and replaced millet porridge so completely that mămăligă became shorthand for peasant food itself. It carries salty sheep cheeses — brânză de burduf matured in pine bark, telemea in brine, urdă the fresh whey cheese — and a spoonful of smântână, the thick sour cream that finishes most Romanian plates.

Preserving shapes the autumn calendar. Cabbages go whole into barrels with salt and dill stalks for winter sarmale; peppers, aubergines and tomatoes are fire-roasted and cooked down into zacuscă, then jarred by the dozen; plums become magiun, a sugarless jam boiled for hours, or țuică, the clear brandy poured before rather than after dinner. Households still measure a good year by how full the pantry shelves are in November.

Regional lines are real. Transylvania cooks with Hungarian and Saxon habits — paprika, sour cream, layered bakes, richer pastries. Moldavia is the region of delicate soups, poached dumplings and the country's best-known sweet breads. Wallachia and the south lean Balkan and Ottoman: grilled meats, aubergine salads, stuffed vegetables, syrupy desserts. Dobrogea, on the Black Sea, cooks fish, Turkish and Tatar pastries, and mutton.