cookiki

Main course

Georgian

Satsivi (Poached Poultry Under a Cold Walnut Sauce)

Poached chicken or turkey served cold under a walnut sauce — a Georgian holiday dish whose name means "the cold thing", and the cold is the method. The walnuts are ground fine and let down with the poaching broth, garlic, vinegar and spices, and the sauce is never cooked. Heat it and the walnut oil separates and the sauce breaks. It goes on the table at New Year and Christmas.

Swiss

Raclette (Melted Cheese Scraped over Potatoes)

A Swiss cheese dish that is barely a recipe: the cut face of a half wheel is held under a heater and the melted layer scraped straight onto hot potatoes. Nothing is added to the cheese — no starch, no wine, no emulsifying salts — because nothing is ever held long enough to need it.

Chinese

Laziji (Fried Chicken Hidden in a Wok of Dried Chillies)

A chicken dish from Leshan in Sichuan. Chicken is chopped small on the bone, fried hard, and then tossed into a wok holding far more dried chilli than chicken. The chilli here is not a seasoning but the bulk of what is in the pan, and it is not there to be eaten: the form of the dish is hunting through the pile with chopsticks for the pieces of chicken.

Portuguese

Frango Piri-Piri (Whole Chicken Split Flat over Charcoal)

Charcoal chicken from Portugal: split down the backbone, pressed flat, and given its piri-piri sauce only once it is nearly cooked. Breast and thigh want different temperatures, and a whole bird cannot be staggered in time the way a dish with two centres usually is. Splitting it is not about speed — it puts both centres in one plane so the fire can separate them by distance instead.

Afghan

Do Piaza (Lamb with the Onion Added Twice)

An Afghan braise of lamb with onion, in which the onion goes in twice. The first lot cooks down until it stops being onion and becomes the body of the sauce; the second goes in late in big petals and stays whole enough to bite. The name is the method.

Korean

Daetongbap (Rice Steamed in a Bamboo Culm)

Soaked grains packed into a length of green bamboo cut at a node, covered with paper and steamed — the rice of Damyang in south-western Korea, also called juktongbap. The culm here is both the vessel and an ingredient, and it is good for one use. Because the tube is closed, the steam never reaches the rice: heat crosses the bamboo wall instead, and since nothing evaporates the tube takes less water than a pot would.

Vietnamese

Ca Loc Nuong Trui (Whole Snakehead Grilled in a Straw Fire)

A Mekong Delta fish cooked the way a rice field allows. A snakehead is left unscaled and ungutted, run through with a bamboo stake, stood upright in the ground and buried under dry rice straw, which is then lit. The straw is gone in minutes and leaves no coals, so the whole cook happens inside the flames that every other fire recipe here tells you to wait out. What blackens is the scales, and the scales are scraped off at the table.

Saudi

Saleeg (Rice Simmered in Broth and Milk)

A rice dish from the Hejaz: chicken simmered soft with cardamom and peppercorns, lifted out and browned, while long-grain rice cooks down in that broth until it collapses, finished with milk and butter. It looks like risotto and works the other way round. The rice is washed, and instead of stirring creaminess out of the grain, the creaminess is brought in as dairy. Kabsa is the control sitting next to it: the same long grain, cooked for the opposite result.

Jamaican

Ackee and Saltfish

Jamaica's national dish: salt cod soaked until it is fish again, then folded through ackee cooked briefly with onion, sweet pepper, scotch bonnet and thyme. Ackee is toxic when unripe, and the thing that matters here is that cooking does not fix it. The pod has to open on the tree by itself; one prised open early stays dangerous however long it is simmered. The instruction is a refusal rather than a technique.

Palestinian

Maqluba (Upside-Down Rice, Aubergine and Chicken)

The name is Arabic for "upside-down", and the act of turning it over is the dish. The pot is packed in the reverse of the order it is served in, so the chicken that goes in first ends up on top of the dome. The aubergine is fried before it goes anywhere near the rice: once fried it stops absorbing oil and starts giving it back, and that is what flavours the rice from the bottom of the pot upward. Inverting it onto the tray at the end is the one step in the recipe you cannot take back.

Georgian

Khinkali (Twisted Dumplings with Broth Inside)

A dumpling from the Georgian mountains. Broth gets inside a wrapper in more than one way: xiaolongbao sets stock into a jelly and puts the water in as a solid, and buuz says outright that its juice is rendered fat rather than stock. Khinkali is the plainest of them. Warm water or broth is stirred straight into raw mince until the filling is slack, and the only things holding it in are a thick dough and the knot on top. That knot is not eaten: it is the handle, and the ones left on the plate are how you count what you ate.

Thai

Kaeng Som (Sour Curry with Fish and Vegetables)

A Thai sour curry with not one drop of fat in it. Every other curry here builds a paste and then fries it in oil or in cracked coconut cream until the oil separates, because aroma dissolves far better in fat than in water. Kaeng som has no fat to fry it in, so the paste is dissolved straight into boiling water. That is why the pounding goes on so long, why the flavour is carried by tamarind and fish sauce rather than by richness, and why what little body it has comes from poached fish pounded into the paste.

Finnish

Kalakukko (Fish and Pork Baked in a Rye Crust)

The dish of Savonia in Finland: small freshwater fish, bones and all, sealed with pork belly inside a rye crust and baked for six hours. Pastry is meant to come out of the oven crisp; this crust is the opposite. It is there to be a pot, and to hold the fish’s own liquid in for six hours. What those six hours do is the point of the dish: the bones of a small fish go soft enough to eat. Leaving them in is design rather than laziness.

Korean

Dak-hanmari (A Whole Chicken in Plain Broth, Seasoned in the Bowl)

The chicken pot that started in Dongdaemun, Seoul in the 1960s, and it is built the opposite way round from every other chicken broth on this site. Samgyetang stuffs the bird with rice, ginseng and garlic and puts everything into the broth; seolleongtang and galbitang finish their flavour in the pot as well. In dak-hanmari the pot holds a chicken, water and a few cloves of garlic, and it is not seasoned at all. All of the flavour is built in the small dish in front of each person, and what that dish turns on is mustard — whose heat contradicts, one by one, everything this site's chilli guide says about capsaicin.

Timorese

Ikan Pepes (Spice-Paste Fish Steamed and Grilled in Banana Leaf)

East Timor's national dish: fish coated in a pounded spice paste, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed, and then put on the coals still wrapped. Every other leaf-wrapped dish on this site stops at the steaming. This one has a second stage, and the order cannot be reversed. Steaming cooks the fish and fixes the paste onto the flesh, but it leaves the surface wet. Grilling drives that water off, and while it does the leaf scorches and its smoke goes inward. Skip the steaming and grill it from raw, and the leaf turns to ash before the fish is done.

Macanese

Minchi (Minced Beef with Fried Potato and an Egg)

Macau's national dish, and the name comes straight from the English word mince. Ground meat is reduced with soy and Worcestershire sauce, small-diced potato is fried separately, and the two are combined at the last second over rice with a fried egg on top. That last second is the whole dish. Cooked with the meat the potato drinks the sauce and goes soft into one mass; added at the end it stays crisp among wet mince, so one bowl carries two textures. This plate is what four hundred years of a Portuguese and Cantonese kitchen produced.

Ethiopian

Doro Wat (Chicken Stew with Berbere and Whole Eggs)

One of Ethiopia's national dishes, and the first thing this site's injera page lists under what goes on it. The aromatics guide sets its order out in numbered steps: heat the fat, whole spices, then the onion. Doro wat deletes step one. A kilo of finely chopped red onion goes into a dry pot with no fat at all and cooks for close to an hour until its water is gone and it has collapsed, and only then do the butter and the berbere arrive. The onion here is not an aromatic being bloomed, it is the body of the sauce. There is no flour, no tomato and no cream in it.

Nigerien

Dambou (Steamed Rice Grits with Moringa Leaves)

One of Niger's national dishes: rice cracked to about the size of semolina, steamed rather than boiled so it stays as separate grains, and mixed with moringa leaves that have been boiled and wrung dry. This site's couscous page tips instant grains into a bowl, pours hot water over and leaves them five minutes, so why steaming is needed at all appears nowhere. Boil the same grits and the starch leaving each surface has somewhere to go, and everything sticks together; steam them and each grain takes up only what condenses on it. And there is no sauce in this dish at all.

Czech

Vepřo Knedlo Zelo (Roast Pork, Bread Dumplings, and Sauerkraut)

Czechia's national dish, and the name is the ingredient list: pork, dumpling, cabbage. This site's other Czech recipe, svíčková, tells you outright that knedlíky are fiddly and to buy them frozen. This is the page that makes them. A knedlík is a yeast-leavened bread dough whose oven is a pot of water, so it has no crust anywhere and its crumb stays wet and elastic. A blade compresses that crumb into paste, which is why it is cut with a length of thread rather than a knife. Cubes of dry stale roll folded through the dough are what hold it open.

Tajik

Qurutob (Torn Flatbread in Dried-Yoghurt Broth)

Tajikistan's national dish: balls of dried yoghurt soaked back into a broth, flatbread torn into it, vegetables piled on top, eaten with the hands from a shared bowl. This site dries fruit, dries vegetables, dries fish and dries bread. The one thing it never dries is the food that spoils fastest — dairy. Qurut is the answer to that: ferment it so the pH is already down, salt it, and dry it in the sun until it is as hard as a stone. It keeps for years with no refrigeration at all.

Portuguese

Bacalhau à Brás (Salt Cod with Onion, Potato and Egg)

The Lisbon dish: salt cod soaked for two days to get the salt back out, then folded together with onion, matchstick potatoes and egg. What does the work is not how long it sits but how many times you change the water. One bowlful is enough to soak beans, because there you are putting water in; salt cod is taking salt out, and left in the same water for two days nothing happens once the fish and the water reach the same concentration. And salt cod cannot be replaced with fresh cod. It is a different material.

Bangladeshi

Ilish Paturi (Mustard-Marinated Fish in Banana Leaf)

A Bengali dish and one of the national dishes of Bangladesh: fish marinated in ground mustard, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed. There is no heat in a mustard seed. The pungency does not exist until the cells are broken in water, it evaporates once made, and heat destroys it. Every hot thing on this site so far has been capsaicin, and capsaicin does none of those three. So the paste is ground with cold water, used within ten minutes, and shut inside a leaf. The mustard oil in the same dish is treated in exactly the opposite way — heated until it smokes, deliberately, to drive the same molecule off.

American

Southern Fried Chicken (Buttermilk-Brined)

The fried chicken of the American South: steeped overnight in buttermilk, dredged in seasoned flour and fried. This site already has four fried chickens and all four use a starch coating or a glaze. What is different here is the step before the coating — buttermilk is really a brine, and over 4 to 24 hours the salt gets right in. The acid does not tenderise the meat. What the acid does is make the flour clump, and that is where the craggy crust comes from.

Chinese

Dongpo Rou (Braised Pork Belly Squares)

Hangzhou's signature dish: pork belly cut into large squares, tied with string and cooked for over two hours skin-side up. The technique is entirely a matter of not disturbing it — the liquid must never reach the skin, the piece is never turned, and a bed of spring onion and ginger keeps the meat off the metal. The skin has to cook in steam above the liquid, not in it, or it will not turn to translucent jelly.

Norwegian

Fårikål (Lamb and Cabbage)

Norway's national dish, and it has four ingredients: lamb on the bone, cabbage, whole black peppercorns and salt. Nothing is browned, no stock goes in, no aromatics are softened first. It is layered into a pot with a little water and left alone for two hours. Not stirring is the only technique in it, and it is what keeps the cabbage in pieces rather than collapsing. The pepper goes in whole and is eaten whole.

French

Blanquette de Veau (Veal in White Sauce)

One of the French national dishes: veal simmered white, and its own cooking liquid turned into the sauce. It breaks the first two rules of braising at once — nothing is browned, and the meat is fully submerged — for a single reason: here the cooking liquid is not a by-product, it is the sauce. It finishes with a liaison of egg yolks and cream, after which the pan can never boil again. Past about 82°C you no longer have a sauce, you have scrambled egg.

Mexican

Chile Relleno (Stuffed Poblano in a Whipped Egg Batter)

A whole poblano charred, peeled, stuffed with cheese, coated in egg and shallow-fried. The batter is the unusual part: whites whipped to peaks with the yolks folded back in — a meringue, in effect. The deep-frying guide files it apart from the coatings that go into the oil wet, it has to be used the moment it is made because a foam collapses, and it will not stick to a damp chilli at all. Charring, peeling and drying the pepper is, in the end, preparation for getting that batter to hold.

Chinese

Huiguorou (Twice-Cooked Pork Belly with Bean Paste)

Pork belly boiled whole, chilled, sliced thin and returned to the wok — the name says the meat comes out of the pot and goes back into it. The reason for cooking it twice is not flavour but the knife: hot belly is too soft in the fat to cut at 2mm, and only when it is thoroughly cold does it slice like paper. And because the slices are that thin, the fat renders fast in the wok and the lean and the fat contract at different rates, so each piece curls into the shape the Sichuanese call a lamp shade.

Nigerian

Suya (Skewered Beef in a Dry Peanut and Chilli Rub)

Skewered beef from the Hausa north of Nigeria, and the whole of it is that the seasoning is a dry powder rather than a liquid. The grilling guide sorts grilled meat into two kinds — salted and marinated — and files suya as the third, a dry powdered rub. The backbone of the powder, yaji, is kuli-kuli: peanut roasted and then pressed to take the oil out. Why it has to be defatted is the principle of the dish. Peanut with its oil still in melts over fire, runs off and brings on flare-ups; peanut with the oil pressed out clings and toasts instead of burning.

German

Eisbein (Cured Pork Knuckle Boiled with Sauerkraut)

A German dish of pork knuckle brined for several days and then boiled, usually with sauerkraut. It is the same cut as suyuk or jokbal, in the same water, for about the same time, and it comes out different because of one step that happens before any of that. Boiling moves a meat’s flavour out into the water; salt that went in days earlier makes the proteins hold on to their own moisture, and the seasoning is already inside where the water cannot take it. Curing salt also leaves the cooked meat pink instead of grey — which is the visible evidence that it was cured at all.

British

Haggis (Sheep Offal and Toasted Oatmeal Boiled in a Casing)

Scotland’s national dish: sheep offal chopped and mixed with toasted oatmeal, onion and suet, packed into a casing and boiled for hours. It fills a casing the way a sausage does and it is aiming at the opposite result. Blood binds a sundae and drawn-out muscle protein binds a weisswurst, both so that a slice holds together; the oatmeal in a haggis is there to stay in separate grains and refuse to bind. Cut the casing and what comes out is not a block to slice but something crumbly you spoon.

Indian

Pav Bhaji (Mumbai Mashed Vegetable Curry with Buttered Rolls)

The Mumbai street food that started as a mill workers’ lunch: vegetables cooked on a wide iron griddle and crushed with a masher as they go. This site’s samosa page tells you to crush the potato by hand because a masher bursts the starch into glue, and the mashed potato page warns that working the starch turns it gluey. Pav bhaji is the dish that wants exactly that. And because mashing keeps exposing new surface to a very hot plate, the same movement that makes it finer is also what drives the water off.

Polish

Bigos (Sauerkraut and Meat Stew)

Poland’s national dish: sauerkraut and fresh cabbage stewed for hours with several kinds of meat. Fresh cabbage boiled for three hours has no shape left, yet the cabbage in this pot still reads as separate strands. The reason is acid. This site’s soaking guide says acid sets pectin firm, which is why tomato goes into a bean dish late — there it is a problem. Here that same property is what makes the dish possible: the lactic acid the sauerkraut made for itself is holding its own cell walls together.

French

Cassoulet (Slow-Baked White Beans with Confit Duck and Sausage)

White beans baked for three hours with confit duck and sausage, the pot dish of Languedoc. The identity of this dish is its crust. Left unstirred, the surface dries and browns into a skin — and you press that skin back down into the pot with the back of a spoon and let another form, over and over. In Castelnaudary they say seven times. Every broken crust returns its browned surface and its fat to the pot, so the dish ends up tasting like its own crust. Only the last one is left whole and carried to the table.

Korean

Jeonbok-juk (Abalone Rice Porridge)

The abalone porridge of Jeju and the east coast. This site’s rice guide calls porridge a failure in two separate places — broken grains turn the pot to porridge, and porridge throughout means too much water or grains broken while rinsing. Juk does all three on purpose: the rice is soaked and then half-crushed, the water goes in at eight times its volume, and you stir until the swollen starch granules burst and disperse. The other half of the dish is the gaeu — the abalone’s viscera, which most people throw away. Fried in sesame oil before anything else, it is what gives the porridge its green cast and its taste of the sea, and it is the difference between this and plain rice porridge with abalone on top.

German

Weisswurst (White Veal Sausage with Parsley and Lemon)

The white sausage of Munich: veal and pork back fat worked into an emulsion, filled into sheep casings and poached in water that is never allowed to boil. Nothing about this dish is decided by an oven or a flame — it is decided by a thermometer. Let the mixture pass about 12C while you are working it and the fat melts and smears, the emulsion breaks, and no amount of further mixing brings it back. That is why ice is an ingredient and why the grinder parts go in the freezer. Then, once filled, it must never pass 80C. Heat is the danger at both ends, in opposite directions.

Italian

Ossobuco (Braised Veal Shank with Gremolata)

A Milanese dish of veal shank cut thick across the bone and braised for two hours. The name means "bone with a hole", and what is in that hole is half the dish: some of the marrow melts out into the sauce, adding fat and gelatin, and the rest is dug out with a small spoon at the table. The other half is gremolata — lemon zest, garlic and parsley chopped together and scattered raw at the very end, the one sharp thing in a pot where two hours have made everything round and deep.

Japanese

Nikujaga (Simmered Beef and Potatoes)

The archetypal Japanese home dish: thin-sliced beef and potatoes simmered in a small amount of seasoned dashi. The beef is not the point of it — it is there to season the potatoes. Because the liquid only comes halfway up, the pot takes a drop lid that rests directly on the food, so the simmering liquid hits it and falls back over everything and seasons the pot evenly without anyone stirring. The order the seasonings go in is fixed too: sugar first, soy sauce later.

Iranian

Fesenjan (Walnut and Pomegranate Stew)

An Iranian stew that takes both its body and its sourness from two things: finely ground walnuts and pomegranate molasses. No flour, no starch. Over two or three hours the walnuts break down completely and thicken the pot themselves, and it is finished when their own oil rises dark on the surface. The colour moving from pale beige to nearly black is the cooking.

Iranian

Ghormeh Sabzi (Herb and Dried Lime Stew)

Iran's national dish: bunches of parsley, coriander, chives and fenugreek leaf fried for twenty-five minutes or more until they go dark, then simmered two hours with lamb, kidney beans and dried limes. It is the opposite of the usual rule that delicate herbs go in at the end. Here you cook them until the fresh green smell has gone entirely, because what is left underneath — deep and almost meaty — is the whole point of the dish.

French

Meunière (Fish in Brown Butter)

A French fish dish: dust the fish lightly with flour, cook it in butter, then take that same butter further until it turns hazelnut brown and finish it with nothing but lemon juice and parsley. No sauce is made separately — the butter the fish cooked in is the sauce. Which means the whole dish comes down to catching a window of about thirty seconds, between the moment the butter smells nutty and the moment it burns.

Ghanaian

Red Red (Bean Stew with Fried Ripe Plantain)

An everyday Ghanaian dish: black-eyed beans stewed with red palm oil and tomato, served with fried ripe plantain. Two red things in it, hence the name. The technique is all on the plantain side. A ripe plantain has already turned most of its starch to sugar, so fried like a potato it burns outside before the middle is done. Keep the oil low and wait until the skins go black.

Mexican

Carnitas (Pork Confited in Lard, Then Crisped)

Pork submerged in lard and held for hours at a low temperature, then finished by raising the heat so the surface fries in that same fat. It is submerged in oil and it is not frying: at around 90°C the fat is only a medium for heat, and because there is no water in it there is nowhere for the flavour to leach away to. The whole dish is one pot changing method halfway.

German

Sauerbraten (Vinegar-Marinated Beef Pot Roast)

A German Sunday roast: a whole piece of beef steeped in vinegar and wine for three or four days, then braised in that same liquid. The usual explanation is that the vinegar tenderises it, and that is not true. Acid stops a few millimetres in; what actually breaks the meat down is three hours of gentle moist heat. So what are the four days for — what they build is not the meat but the sauce.

Peruvian

Anticuchos (Grilled Beef Heart Skewers)

Peruvian street food: beef heart marinated in vinegar and ají panca, skewered and grilled hard over charcoal. Despite being sold as offal, heart is a muscle that never stopped working, so it tastes like very concentrated beef rather than anything like liver. What it has almost none of is fat, which makes the window extremely narrow — two minutes a side, and past that it is leather.

Moroccan

Pastilla (Sweet and Savoury Chicken Pie)

A Moroccan feast pie: spiced chicken, egg and toasted almonds wrapped in thin pastry, baked, and then dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon. The whole dish is that last move — sugar over something savoury — and it sounds like a mistake but is not. Meat braised with saffron and ginger is already leaning sweet, and the sugar finishes the lean while tying the almonds and the cinnamon together.

Belgian

Moules-Frites (Mussels and Chips)

Belgium's national dish: mussels steamed open in a covered pot and served with chips. Almost no liquid goes in. As the shells open they pour out the seawater they were holding, and that becomes the broth — so the best thing in the pot is not something you made but something the mussels brought with them. Five minutes on the heat is the whole of it, and everything past that is a loss.

Singaporean

Chilli Crab

Singapore's signature dish: a whole crab cut into pieces and tossed through a thick tomato and chilli sauce. Despite the name it is not very hot — it is sweet, sour and deeply savoury. What makes it what it is comes at the end, when beaten egg is trickled in to thicken the sauce into ribbons, and the fried mantou buns for mopping up what is left matter about as much as the crab does.

Ukrainian

Chicken Kyiv (Crumbed Chicken with a Garlic Butter Core)

A Ukrainian cutlet: chicken breast beaten thin, wrapped around a baton of garlic butter, breaded twice and fried. The whole dish is the moment the knife goes in and the melted butter comes out under pressure, and every step before it exists to reach that moment. Freezing the butter first, overlapping the seam and crumbing it twice are not flourishes: while it fries, the inside of that parcel is a pressure vessel.

Russian

Pelmeni (Meat Dumplings)

Russian dumplings: thin dough around a raw meat filling, pinched into a ring, boiled and served under soured cream. What separates them from every other dumpling comes after the shaping. They are not eaten fresh — they go onto a tray into the freezer, and then straight into boiling water still frozen, never thawed. The habit comes from a time when a Siberian winter was the freezer, and it still makes the better dumpling.

French

Bœuf Bourguignon (Beef Braised in Red Wine)

The French braise: beef held for three or four hours in Burgundy red wine. The name is the ingredient, so the wine looks like the whole story, and it is not. Two matters of order decide this dish — browning the beef properly, dry and in batches, and cooking the bacon, the pearl onions and the mushrooms separately to add at the end rather than letting them stew in the pot for hours.

French

Pot-au-Feu (Boiled Beef and Vegetables)

The French household dinner: beef and whole-cut vegetables simmered for hours, then served as two things — the broth first, the meat and vegetables after. The name is just "pot on the fire", and inside it sits an old fork in the road: start in cold water and the flavour leaves for the broth, start in boiling water and it stays in the meat. This dish takes both, by using several cuts at once and never letting the pot actually boil.

Japanese

Ochazuke (Rice in Tea and Dashi)

A Japanese bowl of rice with hot tea and dashi poured over it. The ingredient list looks like there is no recipe to speak of, but three things decide it: the rice must not be straight out of the cooker, the liquid comes only up to the level of the rice, and the salt lives in the toppings rather than the broth. Rice in a seasoned soup is a different dish.

Japanese

Hambagu (Hamburg Steak)

The Japanese yoshoku hamburg steak, served on a plate with no bun. It looks like a burger patty in ingredients but is made in the opposite direction: a burger is handled as little as possible, while this is kneaded until it turns tacky, with milk-soaked panko worked in to hold the juices. The dent pressed into the middle is not decoration either — it is what stops the patty doming and splitting.

American

Jambalaya (Louisiana One-Pot Rice)

The Louisiana one-pot rice dish. Brown the sausage and chicken hard, build onion, celery and green pepper on top of what they leave in the pan, and once the rice goes in, do not stir it again. Stirring breaks the grains and releases starch, and it turns to porridge — this is a rice dish made in exactly the opposite direction from risotto.

Portuguese

Francesinha (Porto Sandwich in Beer and Tomato Sauce)

What Porto made of the croque-monsieur, several sizes heavier. Ham, sausage and steak stacked between slices of plain white bread, sheeted in cheese and melted under a grill, then flooded at the last moment with a hot sauce of beer and tomato. What differs from one house to the next is not the filling but the sauce, and so is almost everything there is to learn here.

Korean

Jangeo-gui (Charcoal-Grilled Eel)

Freshwater eel, split and boned, grilled over charcoal — the Korean restorative eaten on the hottest days of summer alongside samgyetang. Glazing it from the start is the commonest way to ruin it: the first grilling is done with salt alone to render the fat and firm the flesh, and only then does the sauce go on, thinly and several times over. The shredded ginger served with it is half the dish rather than a garnish.

French

Jambon-beurre (Ham and Butter Baguette)

France sells more of these than of anything else: a baguette, butter, ham, and nothing further. Three ingredients look like nothing to get wrong, but two conditions decide almost the whole result — the bread has to be same-day, and the butter has to be a layer rather than a condiment. Leaving out the lettuce and the mayonnaise is close to the definition of it.

Korean

Samgyeopsal-gui (Table-Grilled Pork Belly)

Pork belly grilled at the table and eaten wrapped in lettuce — the single best-selling restaurant meal in Korea. With no marinade there seems little to get wrong, but thickness decides everything. The thick-cut belly now standard is cooked in a completely different way from thin slices, and the two habits that lose the juice are turning it constantly and cutting it up with scissors before it is done.

Korean

Godeungeo-gui (Grilled Salted Mackerel)

Butterflied mackerel salted and grilled — the backbone of a Korean rice-and-side-dishes meal. With only fish and salt involved there are exactly three places for technique: when the salt goes on, how dry the surface is before it meets heat, and whether the skin sticks to the pan. Get all three and the skin is crisp and the flesh moist; miss one and the skin stays behind on the pan while the inside goes dry.

The rest of this kind182