Giovanni turned rather white. “Very well, Mistress Mary,” he answered.
Giovanni’s lozenges were not candies, although they were diamond-shaped like the lozenges that are named after them. They were cakes made after the recipe still used in some Italian bakeries. He pounded six ounces of almonds; then he weighed eight eggs and put enough pounded sugar in the opposite scale to balance them; then he took out the eggs and weighed an equal amount of flour, and of butter. He melted the butter in a little silver saucepan. The eggs were not beaten, because egg-beaters had not been invented; they were strained through a sieve from a height into a bowl, and thus mixed with air. Two of the eggs were added to the pounded almonds, and then the whole was mixed with a wooden spoon in a wooden bowl. The paste was spread on a thin copper plate and baked in an oven built into the stone wall and heated by a fireplace underneath. While still warm the cake was cut into diamond-shaped pieces, called lozenges after the carved stone memorial tablets in cathedrals. The Queen approved them, and said that she would have those cakes and none other for the banquet, but with a little more spice. Beppo, who had paid the sweetmeats a grudging compliment, produced some ground spice from his private stores and told Giovanni to use that.
“Vanni,” said Mary laughing as she passed through the kitchen on the morning of the great day, “do you always scour your dishes as carefully as this?” The boy looked up from the copper plate which he was polishing. Mary thought he looked rather somber for a cook who had just been promoted to the office of baker to the King.
“Things cannot be too clean,” he said briefly. “Mistress Mary, will you ask Master Tomaso for some of the spice that he gave to your mother, for me?”
Mary’s blue eyes opened. Surely a court cook like Beppo ought to have all the spice needed for a simple cake like this. However, she brought Giovanni a packet of the fragrant stuff an hour later, and found Beppo fuming because the work was delayed. The basket of selected eggs had been broken, the melted butter had been spilled, and the cakes were not yet ready for the oven. Giovanni silently and deftly finished beating his pastry, added the spice, rolled out the dough, began the baking. When the cakes came out of the oven, done to a turn, and with a most alluring smell, he stood over them as they cooled and packed them carefully with his own hands into a basket. Mary Lavender came through the kitchen just as the last layer was put in.
“Those are beautiful cakes, Vanni,” she said kindly. “I am sure they are fit for the King. Did you use the spice I gave you?”
Giovanni’s heart gave a thump. He had not reckoned on the fact that simple Mary had grown up where there was no need of hiding a plain truth, and now Beppo would know. The cook turned on him.
“What? What?” he cried. “You did not use my spices? You take them and do not use them?”
Mary began to feel frightened. The cook’s black eyes were flashing and his mustache bristling with excitement, until he looked like the cross cat on the border of the Queen’s book of fables. But Giovanni was standing his ground.