Buildings removed to make way for strange mosques. Prankish uniforms.” He shook his head. The soup master gave a little grunt.
“The other day I had to return a pair of slippers that had cost me forty piastres: the stitching was coming away. And I’d only had them a month!” That was quite true: Yashim had bought the slippers from a guildsman. For forty piastres they were meant to last a year. “Sometimes, I’m sorry to say, I think that even our food doesn’t taste quite the way it used to.”
Yashim noticed the soup master’s fingers clench and wondered if he’d gone a bit far. The soup master put a hand up to his moustache and rubbed it between his finger and thumb.
“I’m a eunuch,” Yashim said.
“Aha,” the soup master said complacently. Well, he thought, that bit about the palace was probably true.
“Tell me,” he rumbled. “Do you like coriander seed? In soup?”
It was Yashim’s turn to frown.
“What a peculiar idea,” he said.
Mustafa the Albanian got to his feet with surprising agility.
“Come,” he said simply.
Yashim followed the big man onto the balcony around the courtyard. Below the balustrade, under the arcade, men were busy frying tripe. Apprentices staggered to and fro with buckets they’d filled from the well in the centre of the court. A cat slunk through the shadows, weaving between the legs of enormous chopping blocks. Yashim thought: even the cat has its position here.
They descended a flight of stairs and came out into the arcade. A man wielding a shiny cleaver looked up as they appeared, his eyes streaming with tears. His cleaver fell and rose automatically on a peeled onion: the onion stayed whole until the man swept it aside with a stroke of the blade, and selected another from the basket hanging at the side of the block. Mechanically he began to chop and peel it. Not once did he so much as glance down at his fingers.
Now that, Yashim thought with admiration, is a real skill. The onion man sniffed and nodded a greeting.
The master entered a corridor and began fumbling at his belt for keys. At length he felt what he was looking for and drew it out on a chain. He stopped in front of a thick oak door, banded with iron, and placed the key into the lock.
“That’s a very old key,” Yashim remarked.
“It’s a very old door,” the master replied sensibly. Yashim almost added: “And none the worse for that,” but decided against it. The lock was stiff; the master winced and the key slid sideways in the slot, depressing the necessary pins. The door opened lightly.
They were in a large, low-ceilinged room, lit by an iron grating so high up in the opposite wall that a portion of the ceiling had been sloped upwards to meet it. A few dusty rays of the winter sun fell on a curious collection of objects, ranged in shelves along the side walls. There were wooden boxes, a stack of scrolls, and a line of metal cones of varying sizes whose points seemed to rise and fall like the outline of a decorative frieze. And there, at the back of the hall, stood three enormous cauldrons.
“All our old weights,” said the master. He was looking lovingly at the metal cones. Yashim repressed his impatience.
“Old weights?”
“Every new master sees to it that the guild weights and measures are renewed and re-confirmed on his appointment. The old ones then are stored here.”
“What for?”
“What for?” The master sounded surprised. “For comparison. How else can any of us be sure that the proper standards are being kept? I can place my weights in the balance and see that they accord to a hair’s breadth with the weights we used at the time of the Conquest.”
“That’s almost four centuries ago.”
“Exactly, yes. If the measures are the same, the ingredients must also be the same. Our soups, you understand, are not merely in conformability with the standards. They are -1 do not say the standard itself, but a part of it. An unbroken line which comes down to us from the days of the Conquest. Like the line of the house of Osman itself,” he added, piously.
