“Seeing and doing are far different things.” Maybe little boys watched their mothers in the kitchen as they grew, but they didn’t pay attention, and why should they? Most boys did not grow up to be cooks. When they came to me as apprentices, they had no store of basic knowledge such as a girl would, since any girl knew from infancy that the management of her future husband’s kitchen would be her domain. I insisted all my apprentices start with the basics. Or rather, Marco’s apprentices, but since I was the one who taught them while he took care of the household’s menu planning, I could do it all my way. (Half the time I planned the menus too.) Young Bartolomeo looked mortified to be shown how to hold a knife or beat cream into peaks, especially with the other apprentices his age rolling out pastry dough and whipping up sauces and snickering at him, but a little mortification was good for the soul. I was sure Santa Marta would agree with me. She’d been reduced to a withered hand that lived in a spice box, and she didn’t seem to mind her demotion at all.

“An egg should be boiled for as long as it takes to say the Credo, and no more.” Straight from my father’s book: page 303, Chapter: Lenten Dishes. I tossed Bartolomeo another egg, and he scrambled to catch it against his flour-grimed shirt. “Try again.”

He blew out a breath and dropped the egg into the pot to boil. “Credo in unum Deum—” One of the other apprentices sniggered into a pan of bubbling orange sauce, and Bartolomeo faltered. He’d been bouncing and full of questions when he was just a pot-boy, but now that he was the lowest of all the apprentices, shyness had come with a rush. “Credo in unum Deum—”

“I can’t hear you!” I thundered.

“Patrem omnipoténtem, factorem cæli et terræ—”

“Passable,” I said as his next egg came off the fire soft and perfect. “Now do it again until you don’t have to disrupt my kitchen by shouting a lot of prayers, you pottage-brained, boil-beaked lout.”

“Why do you shout at me, signorina?” he burst out. “You don’t shout at any of the others!”

Because none of the others showed his promise, that was why. By the end of Bartolomeo’s first full day as kitchen apprentice, I went down on my knees before the severed hand of Santa Marta and thanked her for softening Marco’s heart enough to let me keep Bartolomeo on. Not only did my former pot-boy have a cook’s nose, he had a soft wrist that boded well for his future sauces and a natural eye for how long to sear a piece of meat. I would never, however, dream of telling him so.