Free The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel by Elle Newmark Page B

like a recipe collection came to be preserved for centuries. When I asked Enrico about it, he said, “I don’t know, but don’t ask him. Chef Ferrero doesn’t like that kind of question.” Then he pulled his eyelid.
    Another time, a copyist-monk, renowned for his skill as a translator of ancient languages, visited the kitchen and sat with the chef for hours over a single piece of vellum covered with markings thatlooked, from a distance, almost like the sheets of paper I’d seen in the doge’s music room. That time I wondered how the chef himself had become erudite enough to consult with scholars.
    After the monk left, I watched the chef stuff the vellum into one of his books and my curiosity got the best of me. I approached his desk, bowed respectfully, and asked where he’d learned to read and write. He shuffled his papers without looking up.
    “School,” he said. “Where else?”
    “But why do you read all these old manuscripts?”
    “I find history interesting.” He tried to wave me off.
    I scratched my neck. “What’s so interesting about the writings of the dead?”
    He stopped shuffling his papers and looked at me, surprised, as though the answer were painfully obvious. “Luciano,” he said with exaggerated patience, “if we don’t know what happened before we were born, how can we know whether we’re making progress?”
    Marrone , it was obvious. “I never thought of it that way before.”
    The chef sat forward, elbows on his desk, and steepled his fingers. “Let me tell you a story. There was once a vast library—you know what a library is? Good—the Great Library of Alexandria. An Egyptian king required all residents and visitors to surrender every book and scroll they possessed to be copied for the Great Library. Some copies were so precise that the originals were kept for the library and the copies were delivered to the unsuspecting owners. The king also purchased writings from all over the Mediterranean, including the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—”
    “Who?”
    “Wise men with something to say that was worth hearing. The Great Library may have had as many as one million scrolls and codices—history, science, art, philosophy—the greatest collection of human knowledge ever assembled.”
    “Are those the books you study, Maestro?”
    “No.” He smiled sadly. “While wise men acquired knowledge, lesser men made war, and parts of the Great Library were lost from time to time. The final assault came when a Muslim general conquered Alexandria and decided any writing that agreed with his Koran was not needed, and any writing that disagreed with it was not desired. ‘Therefore,’ he said, ‘destroy them all.’ It’s believed that the books were burned to heat bathwater for his soldiers, and there were enough books to provide six months of fuel for the baths.”
    “Why, that’s … that’s …”
    “Disgraceful?”
    “Stupid! It’s just stupid, isn’t it?”
    “Yes, Luciano. And I’m glad you think so.” The chef motioned me forward and lowered his voice. “But the good news is that the keepers of knowledge were not defeated. They devised other ways, craftier ways, to preserve what knowledge came their way. They went underground, assumed disguises, and learned to pass their legacies in code.”
    “What kind of code?”
    The chef sat back and knit his fingers across his chest. “I think we’ll talk more about that another time. But tell me, what have you learned?”
    “That it’s a terrible thing to burn books.”
    “Excellent. Go on now. I believe Dante has beets to peel.” He went back to his papers without another word.
    There were no more stories that day, but in the following days there were many peculiar visitors: a linguist from Genoa, a librarian from the Vatican, a local calligrapher, and a priest purported to have ties to the heretic monk Savonarola. One time, a printer with ink-stained fingers brought the chef one of the