One more sweeping glance over my well-trained team, and I began spooning out sugar and cinnamon myself for sweet tourtes of ripe blackberries and toasted walnuts. And I couldn’t help a smile, because when I’d fled the Convent of Santa Marta I’d sworn I would never cook sweets again, but somehow I was still the one who always made them. Even after all the training I’d given my apprentices and undercooks, they couldn’t equal me when it came to honeyed crostate and marzipan tourtes and sugared fruits. And no wonder, because crostate and tourtes and sugared fruits were all I’d made in my two years as a nun. Nuns were all mad for anything sweet, and I suppose it stood to reason. When two hundred women are forced to give up silk gowns and the pleasures of the flesh, marzipan was all they had to make life special.

But it was Giulia Farnese who ate my cakes and tourtes now, not my spiteful pinch-faced prioress, and I didn’t mind making them for her. At least she said thank you. Though I wondered sometimes if the woman they called the Bride of Christ would laugh if she found out she had a real bride of Christ making her meals.

“More sugar, Bartolomeo,” I called over my shoulder as my apprentice began tossing frittelle ingredients into a mortar.

“There’s enough sugar already,” he said without looking up.

“No, there is not. A large pinch more.”

He added a very small pinch more. I sniffed to let him know I hadn’t missed a thing, but let him continue. I needed all my attention to roll out the tourte dough; I’d done some tweaking to my father’s original recipe, and it resulted in a thinner, flakier texture, but the dough tore very easily. My father was a very great cook in Venice, but I’d begun modifying his recipes lately, something I would have once considered as unthinkable as making a few improving tweaks to the stone tablets of Moses. “You ran away from a convent, girl,” I could hear my father roar at me, “and now you’re changing my recipes?” My father had already cast my name out of the family for good when I ran away from the convent where he’d placed me. He probably cast me out all over again when he realized I’d taken his recipe book with me, and then one more time for good measure when we’d encountered each other by plain chance on the road, and I’d left him unconscious and trussed up in a cellar rather than let him drag me by the hair back to Venice . . . I wasn’t proud of any of it, believe me, but if you’ve already been cast out of a family once, what difference does it make?

Sweet Santa Marta, but I wasn’t a good daughter. I was, however, a better cook than my father.

“Bartolomeo,” I snapped over my shoulder, “why have you got the saffron out? Frittelle do not need saffron.”