Slovakia.

Start with the potato, because half the Slovak canon does. It arrived late — a nineteenth-century crop in the poor northern uplands — and then took over completely, largely because it grows where wheat sulks. Grated raw and bound with flour and egg, it becomes the batter for halušky, the thumbnail dumplings scraped into boiling water through a perforated board; the same batter fried with sauerkraut is strapačky. Boiled and mashed, it becomes the dough for šúľance, for lokše flatbreads baked dry on a hot plate, and for the plump pirohy stuffed with bryndza. One ingredient, four different textures, and a whole cuisine built out of a vegetable that was once famine insurance.

The second pillar is sheep. Wallachian herders moving along the Carpathian arc over several centuries brought transhumant shepherding to the Slovak mountains, and with it the salaš — the summer sheep station where the bača and his crew milked, curdled and smoked. That system produced žinčica, the tangy whey drink; oštiepok, the smoked, decorated cheese pressed in carved wooden moulds; braided korbáčiky; and above all bryndza, made by grinding, salting and ripening fresh sheep cheese into a spreadable, lactic, deeply savoury paste. Slovak bryndza carries an EU protected designation, and its sharpness is the flavour Slovak cooking is organised around: without it, halušky are just dumplings.

Third comes the barrel of sauerkraut and the pig. Cabbage is not a garnish here but a souring agent and a vegetable in one, braised with onion and caraway for strapačky, simmered with smoked sausage and dried wild mushrooms into kapustnica, or stewed with pork and sour cream into segedínsky guláš. Pork supplies the fat as much as the meat — lard for frying, smoked bacon rendered over dumplings, klobása sliced into soup, škvarky (crackling) folded into bread dough. Nothing is wasted and almost nothing is browned aggressively; the flavours come from smoke, souring and long, low heat.

Meal structure is Central European and strict about it. A proper lunch opens with soup, every day, not only on Sundays — a thin broth with liver dumplings, a garlic soup poured over toast, a sour kraut soup. The main course follows, and it may legitimately be sweet: šúľance with poppy seed, pirohy filled with plum jam, or baked yeast buchty count as a full lunch rather than a dessert, a habit shared with Czechia and Austria that confuses visitors more than anything else on the table.

Regional accents are real. The south, long inside the Hungarian sphere, is heavier on paprika, peppers and paprikáš; the northeast leans Rusyn and Polish, with more cabbage, buckwheat and pirohy; the northern mountains of Orava and Liptov are bryndza country. And Bratislava keeps its own layer entirely — a Danube city of Austro-Hungarian coffeehouses whose walnut and poppy seed rožky are a protected pastry, and whose surrounding villages built a whole autumn ritual around roast goose eaten with lokše and young wine.