‘The best minds have been thinking about this since the world began, and they haven’t come up with anything to beat a pickled cucumber.’ So says Count Shabelsky, the buffoonish uncle in Chekhov’s 1887 play Ivanov. It was the first play Chekhov wrote. It was also the first of his I read, embarking cautiously on Elisaveta Fen’s Penguin Classics edition as a sixth-former, and the first I saw on stage, a decade later, in Michael Grandage’s 2008 revival (scripted by Tom Stoppard, on the back of a literal translation by Helen Rappaport, and with Kenneth Branagh in the title role). The production was memorable to me for what Michael Billington described as one of the longest pauses seen on the English stage – as a mortified Ivanov regards a cash loan laid out on a table by his friend Lebedev – and for its marvellous rendition of the pickled-cucumber scene. Lebedev (played by Kevin McNally), Shabelsky (Malcolm Sinclair) and the steward Borkin (Lorcan Cranitch) – all men, of course, who have probably never set foot in a kitchen in their lives, and all somewhat pickled themselves – ecstatically trade recipes for the best snacks to have with vodka: crispy fried gudgeon, steamed white mushrooms, caviar with oil and lemon (‘I’ll tell you what, though, it requires intelligence’), hot onion pasties, salted herring and, of course, pickled cucumber.

Fen’s translation goes with ‘salt cucumbers’, but in fact pickled and salted are the same thing (I say this with borrowed authority, because my chef sister-in-law is the fermentation whiz behind a London pickling workshop called – rather marvellously – Sauerpuss). A 4 per cent brine is what you need