Free The Hundred-Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais

candy and roasted almonds, but we still managed to claim an unoccupied wooden table under a chestnut tree. Around us the locals carried on, a swirl of grandparents and baby carriages and laughter and the gesticulations of local chatter.
    “
Menu completo trifolato,
” Papa ordered.
    “Nah?” said Auntie.
    “Quiet.”
    “What do you mean quiet? Don’t tell me to be quiet! Why everyone shushing me all the time? I want to know what you have ordered.”
    “Must you know everything?” Papa fumed at his sister. “It’s mushroom, yaar. Local mushroom.”
    It certainly was. What came was plate after plate of Pasta ai Porcini and Scaloppine ai Porcini and Contorno di Porcini. One porcini after another porcini, plastic plates streaming out of the tent from across the park, where local women in aprons and dusted with flour dressed mushrooms that looked alarmingly like soggy slivers of liver. And to the tent’s side, a giant vat of sizzling oil, the size of a California hot tub, but rather endearingly shaped like a giant frying pan, the handle artfully piping out the fryer’s gassy fumes. And around the vat stood three men, fat, in massive toques, dunking the flour-dusted porcini
into the sizzling oil while they roared instructions at one another and sipped from paper cups of red wine.
    For three days we soaked up the Tuscan heat and swam, gathering every night for dinner on the
pensione
roof terrace as the sun set over the mountains.
    “Cane,
” Papa informed the waiter.
“Cane rosto
.”
    “Papa! You just ordered a roast dog.”
    “No. No. I didn’t. He understood.”
    “You mean
carne
.
Carne
.”
    “Oh, yes. Yes
. Carne rosto
. And
un piatto di Mussolini
.”
    The perplexed waiter finally retired once we explained Papa wanted a plate of mussels, not the dictator on a dish. Waves of Tuscan food soon broke over the table as a nighttime musk of lavender and sage and citrus wafted over us from a border of terra-cotta pots. We ate wild asparagus served with
fagiole,
fat slabs of beef perfectly charbroiled on wood fires, walnut biscotti dunked in the patron’s own Vin Santo. And laughter, once again laughter.
    Heaven on earth, no?
    Ten weeks after we started our trip across Europe we were back in our funk. The family had become dead tired of all the driving and Papa’s restless rushing to nowhere, these arbitrary scratches in his dog-eared copy of
Le Bottin Gourmand
. And the eating in restaurants, week in, week out, it had become sickening. We would have killed for our own kitchen and a simple potato-and-cauliflower fry-up. But for us, yet another day packed in the cars like in tiffin tins, elbow to elbow, the windows all steamed up.
    And on that October day in the lesser mountains of France when it all came to an end, things were particularly bad. Ammi wept silently in the backseat as the rest of us bickered and Father roared at us to be quiet. After a series of sickening turns up a mountainside, we came upon a pass covered in frosty boulders. The place was eerily shrouded in cold fog. The ski lift was closed, as was a shuttered café in cement, and we passed through without comment into another mountainside descent.
    Over that ridge, however, on the other side of the mountain, the fog abruptly lifted, a blue sky opened up, and we were suddenly surrounded by sun-dappled pines and clean streams running through the woods and shooting under the road.
    Twenty minutes later we came out of the forest into a sloped pasture, the silky grass dotted with white and blue wildflowers. And as we turned at a hairpin in the road, we spied the valley and village below us, a vista of glacier blue trout streams sparkling under a cloudless autumn day in the French Jura.
    Our cars, as if intoxicated by the beauty, swayed drunkenly down the meandering road into the valley. Church bells tolled out across the plowed fields; a wild woodcock darted across the sky, disappearing in the russet and gold leaves of a birch-tree clump. Up on the