Pupusas, and everything after them.

Salvadoran cooking is corn, pork, cheese and the sea, and it is best understood by eating in the order the day expects.

Pupusas

A thick disc of masa, stuffed and griddled, served two or three to a plate with curtido and a thin tomato salsa. The standard order is revueltas — beans, cheese and chicharrón together. Queso con loroco swaps the pork for a flower bud that tastes of artichoke and nothing else on earth.

Corn flour is the default. Rice flour, the speciality of Olocuilta on the airport road, is crisper and better. They cost between $0.50 and $1.00 and you eat them with your hands.

The rest of the table

• Yuca frita con chicharrón — fried cassava and pork, with curtido, from a night-market stall.
• Mariscada — a coconut-thickened seafood stew on the coast. A meal and an event.
• Sopa de pata — tripe and trotter soup, the hangover cure, not for the tentative.
• Panes con pollo — a slow-braised chicken sandwich, wet, wrapped in paper, better than it sounds.
• Tamales de elote — sweet corn tamales, breakfast, wrapped in the husk.

What to drink

Atol de elote, warm sweet corn, in the morning. Horchata, which here is morro seed rather than rice and tastes of toasted sesame. Kolashanpan, a fluorescent cream soda that is entirely indefensible and entirely necessary once.

Where to eat it

Not in restaurants. The best pupusas in the country come off a comal at a roadside pupusería with plastic chairs, at around six in the evening when the griddles are hot and the queue tells you which one to join. Olocuilta, on the highway from the airport, is worth building into an arrival day.