Sunday dinner ideas by cuisine

The roast is the headline and the rest of the table is where the cooking actually is: potatoes done properly, a green vegetable that has not been boiled into submission, a gravy built from the pan rather than a packet.

Italian home cooking is regional before it is national — a Sunday table in Bologna and one in Palermo share a language and almost nothing else.

Japanese home cooking is not restaurant cooking.

A working shorthand rather than a country: the cooking of the olive-oil belt, from the Levant through Greece and southern Italy to Spain and North Africa.

Thai cooking balances four things — hot, sour, salty, sweet — and the balancing happens at the end, by taste, not at the start by recipe.

The cooking of long winters and good pork: cutlets, braises, dumplings, cabbage in every form fermentation allows.

Greek home cooking runs on olive oil, lemon, oregano and whatever the garden produced.

Not one cuisine but a subcontinent of them, joined by a technique rather than a flavour: spices bloomed in hot fat to build a base before anything else goes in.

A Korean table is built around banchan — the small dishes that stay on the table through the meal — with one hot main in the middle.

The plans here are mostly home cooking rather than banquet food — the fast, wok-driven dishes a family actually eats, plus the slower red-braises that reward an afternoon.

Mexican cooking is a chile cuisine before it is a spice cuisine, and the chiles are mostly used dried, toasted and rehydrated rather than fresh.

The cooking of the eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf: grains, pulses, herbs used by the handful rather than the sprig, and sourness from lemon, pomegranate or sumac in place of the vinegar Europe reaches for.

Regional cooking that mostly refuses to be one thing: a grill tradition, a baking tradition, a fried-chicken tradition and a casserole tradition that share a continent and not much else.

Island cooking is a record of everyone who passed through — West African, Indian, Spanish, French and British technique layered onto what grows in the tropics.

Vietnamese cooking runs cooler and fresher than its neighbours: raw herbs by the plateful, dressings built on fish sauce and lime rather than oil, and grilled meat used as one component of a bowl rather than the centre of a plate.

French technique is the grammar much of Western restaurant cooking is written in, but French home cooking is plainer than its reputation: a roast chicken, a gratin, a braise that has been in the oven since lunchtime.

A deliberately broad heading covering the cooking of a dozen countries that share ingredients — maize, beans, chiles, citrus — and differ sharply in how they use them.

Spanish home cooking is short ingredient lists and good raw material: olive oil, garlic, pimentón, whatever came off the boat.