Taiwan.

Start with the pantry, because Taiwanese flavour is unusually consistent from one dish to the next. Soy sauce does the heavy lifting, often two kinds — a saltier light one for seasoning and a thicker, darker one for colour. Rice wine (michiu) goes into almost everything with meat in it; toasted sesame oil arrives late, off the heat, or is used as the actual cooking fat in the sesame-oil chicken dishes of winter. Rock sugar rounds the salt without reading as dessert. White pepper, not black, is the default warm note, and fried shallots — crisp, sold in tubs, scattered on rice at the last second — are the single ingredient most home cooks reach for to make plain food taste Taiwanese.

The preserved shelf matters just as much. Fermented mustard greens turn up as suan cai in beef noodle soup and as sour, salty strands folded into steamed buns. Dried radish (cai pu) goes into omelettes, dried baby shrimp and flat dried squid rehydrate into stir-fries and broths, and pickled cucumber or bamboo comes free with breakfast congee. These are not garnishes: they are the acid and the salt spike that keep rich braises from flattening out.

Technique splits three ways. Long braising in a soy master liquid — the lu pot — produces lu rou fan, tea eggs, braised tofu and the deep-brown pork belly that fills gua bao. Fast wok work covers Hakka stir-fries and the three-cup method, where sesame oil, soy and rice wine reduce onto meat in an open clay pot until barely any liquid is left. Steaming handles buns, fish and glutinous rice. Then there is texture: Taiwanese cooks chase what they call Q — a springy, resilient chew — using sweet potato starch and tapioca in oyster omelettes, meatballs and tapioca pearls, and it is judged as seriously as seasoning.

A home meal is rice plus several shared dishes and a soup on the table at the same time, not in courses. Breakfast is its own institution, eaten out: hot or cold soy milk, savoury soy curd, egg crêpes, rice rolls, sesame flatbread. Late in the day the night market takes over with xiaochi — literally small eats — meant to be sampled in quantity rather than ordered as one plate.

Regionally, Tainan cooks noticeably sweeter and holds the oldest street-food canon; Taipei inherited the mainland restaurant traditions that arrived with the Nationalist government; the Hakka hill counties of Hsinchu and Miaoli cook saltier, oilier, more preserved food built for farm labour; and the east coast and offshore islands lean on seafood and on Indigenous ingredients like mountain pepper (maqaw), millet and wild greens that mainstream Taiwanese cooking is only now taking seriously.