A fine semolina base, soaked akkawi, and cool syrup poured over the moment it leaves the oven. Palestinian, from Nablus, and sold on every breakfast counter in Beirut — including in a sesame roll, wh…

Ground melon seed cooked in palm oil with beef and smoked fish until it sets into soft lumps. Thick enough to sit still on the plate — a Nigerian soup, which is not a thing you drink.

Lentils, rice and 700 g of onions taken to dark brown and slightly bitter, which is where the flavour is. The lentils are cooked separately first so nothing turns to mush, and some of the onion oil g…

Beef sliced thin, coated twice in yaji — the groundnut and chilli spice mix that is the actual dish — and grilled hard. With a method for making yaji when you cannot buy kuli-kuli.

Pork shoulder marinated in a guajillo and achiote adobo, stacked on skewers in a loaf tin, roasted, then sliced and crisped in a hot pan. An adaptation of a spit-roasted dish, and honest about it.

Velveted chicken, dried chillies toasted for aroma, peanuts thrown in off the heat, and a sauce that is sour before it is sweet. About four minutes of cooking and twenty minutes of getting ready.

Tomatillo salsa charred on a dry pan, day-old tortilla chips folded through it at the last second, and everything on the table within a minute. Breakfast, and a use for yesterday's tortillas.

A small dry bowl: sauce in the bottom, noodles on top, crisp pork and preserved mustard greens over that, tossed by whoever is eating it. No broth and no peanut butter.

Masa harina, warm water and salt, hydrated by feel and cooked on a dry comal in three flips until they puff. The foundation the rest of this section stands on.

A lean chocolate cake, a sieved apricot layer and a boiled sugar glaze taken to 108°C. What settles it is the minute the cake leaves the oven and the temperature of the syrup, not whose recipe you fo…

A ratio rather than a recipe: eggs to filling to pan diameter, low heat all the way, and a grill finish. With one worked version made of a courgette and a cold potato.

A dough of flour, water, oil and an egg pulled by hand over a tablecloth until you can read through it. Not puff pastry, not filo, and the only version worth the afternoon.

Vacuum-packed gnocchi straight from the packet into hot fat, never boiled, until they blister and go crisp. Twenty minutes, one pan, and not an Italian dish.

One loaf, 75% hydration, mixed on a weekday evening and baked before work the next morning. Honest about baker's percentages, honest about what your flour can and cannot give you.

Silken tofu held whole in a red, glossy sauce built on chilli bean paste fried until the oil runs red, finished off the heat with Sichuan pepper ground to order. Numbing and hot, which are two separa…

A parsley salad with a little bulgur in it: 400 g of parsley to 45 g of fine bulgur, soaked in tomato juice rather than boiled. Cut with a knife, kept dry, and dressed at the table.

Skin-on thighs started in a cold pan so the fat renders properly, then tinned beans finished in that fat with garlic, lemon and whatever greens are in the drawer. Thirty minutes, one pan, no oven.

Parboiled long-grain rice steamed in a fried pepper base until it is red the whole way through, with a browned layer at the bottom of the pot. The Lagos version, written by someone with no interest i…

The five-minute technique that stands between a plain chicken breast and dinner. Learn one ratio — shallot, acid, stock, cold butter — and you stop needing sauce recipes.

Onion soup as it actually is: an hour and a half of onions, a good stock, and a lid of Comté grilled to the rim. The caramelising time in this recipe is the real one, not the one that fits a magazine…

Salted a day ahead, roasted untrussed on a bed of onions, rested breast-down, and finished with a sauce made in the tin. Three decisions do the work; almost everything else you have read about roast…

An anchovy, two pickled guindillas and an olive on a stick. San Sebastián's first pintxo, named after the Rita Hayworth film. Nothing to cook and everything to buy properly.

Raw prawns cooked barely a minute in olive oil with sliced garlic and dried chilli. Fifteen minutes, six things in the pan, and the whole dish stands or falls on the prawns.

Cream cheese, sugar, eggs and cream baked in a violently hot oven until the top is genuinely burnt and the middle is still barely set. From the bar in my city that worked it out.

Soft yellow dal with a tempering of cumin, mustard, asafoetida, curry leaf and garlic poured over at the last second. Really a lesson in tadka — the order the spices go into the fat, and why it happe…

Vegetables boiled, then mashed and fried down on a hot griddle until the spice sticks to the metal, with soft rolls split and toasted in the same butter. My city's food, cooked the way the stalls coo…

Chicken charred hard under a grill, then held in a tomato gravy emulsified with cold butter. Not a Mumbai dish and not mine — a Delhi one, written down carefully by someone who studies it.

Flour, eggs, a board and a long pin. The ratio by weight, how to knead it, how thin thin actually is, and an honest account of what a machine does and does not cost you.

A short cure, a night drying in the fridge, then two hours over alder at 75 to 90°C. This is hot smoking: the fish comes out cooked and flaky, not sliceable. It is the kind you can do safely at home.