We are in the kitchen, the usual kitchen. Marco is at the far end, coring strawberries, and I am at the big table carefully peeling potatoes with an ancient metal peeler that feels near collapse. I am moving slowly, drawing brown peel away from the creamy flesh beneath, mounding the peels in a loose pile under my hands. When it comes time to remove the eyes, I flick them out with the tip of the peeler and try to get them to sail across the table into the stainless compost bucket. I have made a game of it, making soft noises in the otherwise quiet kitchen as we are bent to our respective work. I fail to hit the bucket far more than I succeed.

Juliet is cutting carrots, concentrating. Her hands are steady as she grips each one, then brings the knife carefully down only as far as she needs to and no more, all with impressive speed. The curious thing about this is that she is using the cookbook as her cutting board, open to the pages of her recipe. The book is one of the old ones, bound by some old man's hands in red coastal leather, the gold leaf on the spine and the boards all but a mystery. The book contains engravings of oddly shaped men standing and slaughtering and roasting sideways, always sideways. The paper flexes a little under each sharp snap of the knife.

I watch her for a while. She realizes this, stopping to look up and meet my question.

"I am careful," she tells me, wiggling the knife in my direction. "But it remains that books like this must live in the kitchen." She returns to the chopping. "They become part of the kitchen," she says. "The sops and spills in here become part of them, give them history." She points to the Carello in the corner. "I cracked an egg over the almond bread in that one. It turned the paper like oilskin." She looks over her shoulder, and nods to her self. "All of the bottoms of the pages in Fortune's Fool are stained purple from a bath in good Barolo. All of these books bear traces of what they taught to make." She has paused again. "It is right that it is this way."

Marco coughs on his end of the room. "It is true, too," he says, "that angels live in books." He looks at us, smiling. "They rest in the threads, in little beds hung between the folds of the signatures. It is good to let a little food fall into the cookbook, for they eat it, and they thank you." With a shrug, he is back to work.

The kitchen once again becomes a quiet collection of the sound of hands on ingredients and the occasional shake of insects outside and in. I may have heard Juliet grunt, but I am not sure. I flick a bit of potato across the table, and I have many yet to do. It hits in inside wall of the bucket and sticks for a moment before tumbling to the bottom. I am getting better.