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From then on I kept a record pinned to the inside of the larder door, listing every dish I served and the date I served it. It became a point of some pride that no main course appeared more than once a month. It also became, I later discovered, the subject of a betting pool run by the electricians, who stood to win a bottle of whisky if I slipped up before midwinter.

It was during that stretch that I finally understood my predecessor’s note about Fridays. A routine, I realised, matters less for what it contains than for the fact that people can count on it. So I began making pizza every Friday without fail, and letting anyone who wanted to come into the kitchen and assemble their own. Within a month it had become the most eagerly awaited evening of the week.

What I did grasp at once was that food on the station mattered in a way it seldom does anywhere else. There was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and, for most of the winter, very little to do outside in the dark and the cold. Meals were the fixed points around which everyone’s day was arranged, and a disappointing dinner could sour the mood of the whole base for a surprisingly long time.

I left the station a week later, handing my folder of notes to my successor, a cheerful young man from Lyon who seemed unperturbed by anything I told him. I had added only one note of my own to those I had inherited, underlining it twice in the same way. It read: ‘They are not hungry for food.’

The last supply ship of the season sailed in early March. It had delivered everything we would eat until November: tonnes of frozen meat and vegetables, flour by the pallet, tinned tomatoes in quantities I had previously associated only with wartime, and a single crate of fresh fruit that everyone knew would be gone within a fortnight. I watched it leave with the feeling, familiar to anyone who has been left in charge of something, that I had not asked nearly enough questions.

By the time the sun returned in August, a thin orange line along the horizon for barely half an hour, the station felt different. People lingered at the table again, and the record on the larder door had acquired a second column, in which various residents had written suggestions, requests and, in one case, a short poem about lasagne.

The scientists, I soon discovered, regarded meals mainly as an interruption to their work. Most of them ate quickly and in silence, often carrying their plates back to the laboratories, and seemed scarcely to notice what was on them. After a few weeks of this, I stopped taking much trouble over dinner and concentrated instead on keeping the stores in order and the freezers properly organised.

I spent six weeks on the menu and most of the final three days in the kitchen. There were seven courses, including a beef Wellington made with meat that had been frozen since the previous October, and a dessert built around the last of the chocolate, which I had hidden, on my predecessor’s advice, in a box marked ‘cleaning supplies’. When it was over, the electricians conceded that there would be no whisky.