Brazil

On a Saturday the pot to find is feijoada: black beans stewed slow and dark with pork of every cut, ladled over rice with shredded collard greens, a dusting of toasted farofa and slices of orange to cut the richness — a caipirinha sweating on the table beside it. Brazil is a continent pretending to be a country, and the food shifts with the map, from the African-rooted north-east to the cattle-ranching south.

Nowhere shows the appetite better than the churrascaria, where waiters prowl the room carving fire-grilled beef off long skewers until you surrender and flip your card to red. Minas Gerais bakes warm, chewy pão de queijo cheese-bread; Bahia cooks with red dendê palm oil and coconut, turning out prawn acarajé fritters and clay-pot moqueca stew; and the Amazon spoons up açaí, thick, cold and deep purple. To drink, it's cachaça — raw sugarcane spirit — muddled with lime and sugar into that caipirinha, chased by a tiny, fierce cafezinho coffee.