Sunday dinner ideas by cuisine

Japanese home cooking is not restaurant cooking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Rice, lentils, coconut and curry leaf, with tamarind supplying the sourness that dairy provides further north.

Dumplings, sour flavours from fermented rye and cabbage, and pork throughout.

An Atlantic cooking tradition built on salt cod, pork and coriander — the last of which separates it sharply from Spanish food.

Preserving as a cuisine: cured fish, pickled vegetables, rye and dairy.

Arab, Greek and Norman influence in one place: pine nuts and raisins in savoury dishes, sardines with pasta, aubergine treated with more respect than anywhere else in Europe.

Fujianese roots, Japanese occupation and a street-food culture that shaped the home cooking.

Corn is the throughline — arepas on both sides of the border, argued about on both.

Spanish technique, Caribbean ingredients and a sofrito base under most of it.

Sweet and savoury sit together without apology — preserved lemon, olives, dried fruit and warm spice in the same pot.

Japanese and Chinese immigration met Andean ingredients and produced something genuinely distinct.

Sofrito and adobo underneath nearly everything, with plantain in a dozen forms on top.