Solyanka

Warm the oil in a large heavy pan over medium heat.

Cook the onions for 8-10 minutes, stirring now and then, until soft and translucent.

Stir in the tomato puree and cook for 2 minutes, stirring, until it darkens to brick red and smells sweet rather than tinny.

Add all four meats and fry for 5-6 minutes, until the edges have crisped and a slick of orange fat has come out of them.

Fry the meats rather than dropping them straight into the broth. Cured meat simmered from raw gives salt and very little else, and those browned edges are where the smoke in the finished soup comes from.

Add the cucumber batons and cook for 3 minutes, until they lose their gloss and start to smell of pickle.

Pour in the chicken stock and the cucumber brine, and drop in the bay leaves.

Use the brine and not water. It carries the lactic sourness that makes this a solyanka rather than a pan of stock with sausage in it, and it also carries a great deal of salt, which is why nothing is seasoned yet.

Simmer for 20 minutes, until the broth has taken colour from the tomato and tastes distinctly smoky.

Add the capers and the olives and simmer for 5 minutes more.

Take the pan off the heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Add the lemon juice off the heat. Sourness of this kind is a top note and it boils away in a minute, so a soup simmered with it in tastes dull and needs twice as much to fix.

Season with the ground peppercorns.

Taste before you reach for the salt at all. Between four cured meats, the brine, the capers and the olives, most pans of this need none, and a solyanka salted on the way cannot be rescued.

Ladle into warm bowls.

Float a slice of lemon on each one.

Add a spoon of smetana and scatter the dill over.

Cool any left over in a shallow container, refrigerate within two hours and eat it within three days.

Reheat it to a simmer and expect it sharper and smokier on the second day, which is how most people prefer it.