Oman

Omani food reflects Indian Ocean trade, fragrant rice dishes, slow-cooked shuwa (spiced meat buried and roasted for a day), and dates in everything. Cardamom coffee and rosewater define its hospitable table.

Shuwa can take up to forty-eight hours. Meat is rubbed with a spice paste, wrapped in banana or palm leaves and sacking, and lowered into a communal earth pit on the first day of Eid, with each family marking its own bundle; the pit is sealed and opened on the second or third day. What comes out is soft enough to pull apart by hand.

Oman's kitchen faces the sea rather than the desert. Its sultans ruled Zanzibar from the early nineteenth century and moved the court there, developing the clove plantations that made the islands the world's leading producer, and the traffic ran both ways in rice, spice and technique. The dried lime called loomi, dropped whole into stews, is the shared marker across the whole Gulf.

A thick, sweet Omani wheat soup of dates, date molasses and milk, made through Ramadan and eaten after the fast.