I have never been so pleased to see a petrol station in my life. Three hours into our drive from Split airport, convinced the sat nav had developed a personal vendetta against me, we finally spotted the familiar green glow of an INA forecourt just outside Makarska. I had been gripping the steering wheel like it owed me money, certain that every winding coastal road was leading us to a dramatic cliff-edge finale rather than a holiday let. My partner, ever the optimist, had spent the last forty minutes insisting we were "probably nearly there" in increasingly unconvincing tones.

The mishap, because there is always one with us, came at that very petrol station. I emerged from paying to find my other half in animated conversation with a man who appeared to be selling something from his boot. Turned out he was not selling anything. He was simply a local called Ivan who had noticed our British plates and wanted to recommend his cousin's konoba for dinner. My partner, bless her, had somehow understood this as directions to our accommodation. She had written down "turn left at the big tree, past the goat" with the seriousness of someone transcribing state secrets. Ivan's actual directions to the restaurant, I later gathered, involved no goats whatsoever.

We found the property eventually, a smart apartment block tucked into the hillside above Baska Voda with a view that genuinely made me forget about the goat. The woman who checked us in, Marija, spoke English in the way I speak Croatian, which is to say with tremendous enthusiasm and occasional creative liberties. She showed us the terrace, the pool, the "very good" washing machine, and then spent fifteen minutes explaining her mother's recipe for soparnik with such intensity that I felt we had been enrolled in a culinary apprenticeship. When I admitted I had never heard of soparnik, she looked at me with the pity usually reserved for people who have never encountered electricity.

The first evening, we walked down to Baska Voda's harbour front, still slightly dazed from travel and Marija's vegetable-based storytelling. We stopped at a bar where the barman, Dario, immediately identified us as fresh arrivals by our sun-starved complexions. He asked where we were staying, nodded approvingly at the mention of Marija, and informed us that her mother made the best soparnik in Dalmatia, possibly Europe, possibly the world. This seemed to be common knowledge. I began to understand that soparnik was not merely food but a local religion.

An elderly man at the next table, introduced only as "Ante, he fishes," leaned across to ask if we liked prsut. I said we did, which was apparently the correct answer, because he spent the next twenty minutes detailing the curing process used by his brother-in-law, who lived "up the hill, not that hill, the other hill." Every sentence contained at least one hill and one relative. By the time he finished, I felt I could draw a family tree of the entire municipality.

What struck me, walking back up to the apartment that first night, was how immediately we had been absorbed into something. Not as tourists exactly, more as people who needed educating about proper pastry and cured meat. There was no performance in it, no sense of being handled. Marija had not given us a welcome pack; she had given us her mother's life story. Ivan had not been selling bootleg goods; he had simply been unable to pass a confused foreigner without intervention. Even the goat, whatever its actual location, felt like part of some larger narrative we were only beginning to understand.

I lay on the terrace later, listening to the distant sound of harbour nightlife and closer sounds of someone, presumably Ante's brother-in-law, doing something enthusiastic with a hammer up the hill, not that hill, the other hill. My partner consulted her notes. "Left at the big tree," she murmured, as if it might eventually make sense. It would not, I suspected, for several days yet. But I was already rather glad of that.