“Sturgeon.” I paused by the display of glassy-eyed fish, piled in a gleaming dark-green stack. I fixed the vendor with a scowl as he oozed toward me with a gap-toothed smile and a proffer of a hairy slablike hand covered in fish scales. “Caught yesterday or today, signore? Get a sturgeon fresh, Bartolomeo, and if you store it properly it will keep all year. No, I don’t know why! Give a sniff, are they fresh?” That discerning nose of my apprentice’s was very handy in a fish market, where the vendors were always trying to palm off dodgy fish under a layer of new-caught.

I gave the sturgeon a dismissive slap on Bartolomeo’s recommendation, made an obscene gesture back at the vendor when he swore at me, and elbowed my way to the next set of buckets with my apprentice trailing behind. “Now, that’s red mullet,” I told him, pointing. “In Venice, they call red mullet barbari. No, I don’t know why. You remember the recipe for grilling them? . . . Very good, but a mullet is left scaled, and then floured. That’s turbot; excellent for making fish jellies. They don’t have to be scaled either, but you do have to buy them live. I don’t know; the jelly tastes better the more recently the turbot was killed. Horse mackerel—sniff it for me. Fresh? Good. These are too big. Of course fish can be too big; for grilling and frying they have to be smaller—ask why again, Bartolomeo, and I shall hit you!”

“Yes, signorina,” he grunted, staggering along behind me with the now-heaping basket, the tips of his ears flushed red as his hair. I stopped abruptly and he fell over my foot.

“Pay attention. These are something special.” I bent and gave a rapturous sniff to the display of tiny, tiny, nearly transparent fish. “Smelt, and good ones. Probably brought in from Lake Bolsena. We’ll buy them for Madonna Giulia.”

“Why?” Bartolomeo asked, and then hastily went on. “Why for Madonna Giulia, that is. She doesn’t like red mullet? She eats everything.”

“She was born at Lake Bolsena, and she’ll have grown up eating smelt like this. She’ll be reminded of home, and she’ll smile, and those are the kinds of meals that get compliments sent down to the kitchens afterward.” I paused, looking at my apprentice. He had a cook’s nose; I’d known that almost at once. But there were other things a cook needed, and it was time to find out if he had them. “Do you want to be a cook, Bartolomeo?”

“Yes, signorina.” No hesitation.

“Why?”