Cooking as Fast as I Can: A Chef's Story of Family, Food, and Forgiveness - Hardcover

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Cat Cora grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and attended the Culinary Institute of America and worked in New York City before travelling overseas to apprentice in Europe with world-renowned French chefs Georges Blanc and Roger Vergé. She settled in Napa Valley in her first job as a chef. After The Food Network discovered her in 1999, she went on to become the first female Iron Chef for the Network. She is the founder of the charitable organization Chefs for Humanity, a grassroots organization that mobilizes chefs to lend their skills to communities in need, and she has built a brand that includes two food lines, cookware a shoe line, cookbooks and restaurants, in Orlando, Costa Mesa, Houston, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Singapore. She lives in Santa Barbara.

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Cooking as Fast as I Can

one

I spent the first week of my life at the Mississippi Children’s Home, waiting to be adopted. My name then was Melanie. The word means dark in Greek, and referred to my brown hair, my deep brown eyes.

My birth mother was sixteen when she got pregnant with me. It was 1967. Whatever free-love thing was happening in other parts of the country in the late sixties, it was not happening in Greenwood, Mississippi. A girl who got knocked up there brought shame upon herself and her family.

When she began to show, my birth mother was sent to a home for unwed mothers on the outskirts of New Orleans, where the girls scrubbed the floors and toilets with toothbrushes, penance for believing boys who said it would be okay. She was the youngest mother-to-be in the home, and on the weekends she was thrilled to be invited to go into town with her older friends, young women in their early twenties, also inconveniently pregnant. They would leave her at a cafe with their purses while they went out and turned a few tricks.

The day she went into labor, my birth mother was sent to the hospital. All the rooms were full, so she was left on a gurney in the hallway. A midwife happened past and took pity on her and wrapped her in a blanket, the tradition at the time. First babies are notoriously slow to make an appearance—not me. Less than a minute later my birth mother hollered, “The baby! The baby’s on the bed.” The nurse, a soft-spoken African American woman, cried, “Holy shit, that baby done flown out.” Or so the story goes. But sure enough, there I was, between my mother’s knees, still tied by my umbilical cord, screaming my head off. I wasn’t waiting until my birth mother had been settled in her room, wasn’t waiting for the doctor to arrive, wasn’t waiting to be invited.

Two hours away, in Jackson, the state capital, Virginia Lee and Spiro Cora received a phone call from an adoption agency where they’d filed papers to adopt another child. They were an upstanding middle-class couple—she a nurse, he a teacher—who had already adopted a son, Michael, and were hoping for a daughter. “We have a baby girl for you,” said the woman from the adoption agency.

A week later, the people who would become my parents picked me up at the Children’s Home and changed my name to Catherine Anne.



My childhood was as perfect as could be.

We lived on Swan Lake Drive in Jackson, in a development of low-slung, single-story homes built around finger-shaped Swan Lake. Our little house was across the street from the waterfront homes; our backyard gave out into what seemed to be endless fairy-tale piney woods—a true wilderness. There my brothers and I built forts and cut down a Charlie Brown tree every Christmas, then dragged it through the backyard and into the living room. Mike was three years older than me, and Chris, born not long after my adoption was finalized, was only thirteen months younger.

I had my first kiss in these woods at the age of eight. She was a small blond girl with a pixie haircut who was visiting her grandparents for the summer. One of us thought it would be a rad idea to experiment with kissing. Her soft mouth tasted of Aim toothpaste with a hint of Orange Crush soda and the Green Apple Jolly Rancher candies we’d sucked on earlier. It was definitely better than kissing second-grader Johnny Purvis.

My mom and dad both worked full-time, but if there were better-loved latchkey kids, I’d like to meet them. At 6:00 a.m., Mom would flip on my bedroom light and say, “Time to get up!” Despite her own hectic morning schedule, she always packed our lunches. Hot school lunches were too expensive, yet my parents made too much to qualify for assistance. Peanut butter and jelly, egg salad, and bologna were the sandwiches in rotation. Sometimes if she ran out of peanut butter and payday was too far away, she substituted mayonnaise and jelly, the thought of which grosses me out even now. In those days, no one in the Deep South—even a trained nurse—thought keeping a sandwich made with mayonnaise in a metal school locker for six hours was a bad idea. But my brothers and I were well acquainted with the stink it caused, and would toss those sandwiches into the garbage next to the bus stop. (It was six houses down, a distance my mom felt confident we could negotiate by ourselves.) Unless we were lucky enough to have a PB&J sandwich that day, we made do with a bag of Fritos, a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Sandwich, and an apple.



Our dad taught world history at Wingfield High School, and he came home every day around four thirty. This gave us a good ninety minutes every afternoon to get into trouble, because once he got home, he would keep an eye on us by planting himself in his La-Z-Boy recliner, in his undershirt and slacks, reheating a cup of morning coffee and reading the paper until Mom got home. He didn’t believe in interfering, but he wouldn’t let us think we were unsupervised.

First thing after we got home, we’d dump our book bags onto the floor by the door. We either made ourselves a redneck grilled cheese—white bread topped with “green can” Parmesan melted in the toaster oven—or else we’d turn on the FryDaddy and make ourselves some french fries. I can’t imagine letting unsupervised grade-school kids loose around hot cooking oil, but back then in Mississippi, kids were raised to take care of themselves.

Mike always had a dumb stunt or two up his sleeve. I displayed my adoration for him by being his willing partner in crime. Once he showed me the art of smoking grocery bags. We sat on the porch, and he ripped a brown paper grocery bag into neat strips, then rolled them into perfect, tight little “cigarettes.” We lit up and I sucked on mine until I barfed all over the front porch.

A few years later, when I was about ten, he convinced me to try dipping snuff. He was already a confirmed Skoal dipper, and his suggestion tapped right into that part of my personality that believes if it’s wrong, there’s got to be a part of it that feels really right. I took his challenge and shoved some dip between my cheek and gums. I thought I was a tough titty until the trees started spinning. That was my first genuine buzz. It sure wouldn’t be my last.

If the weather was fine, we often enjoyed a little water-skiing on the lake, off the back of Mike’s flat-bottomed jon boat. The vessel was built for fishing and poking around the shallows, but we were undeterred. We were eager to perfect our stunts.

If we saw some mom standing on her back porch with her hands cupped around her mouth shouting some version of “You Cora kids, get out of that boat and go on home,” we knew her next step would be calling our mom and telling her, “Your damn kids were out there skiing and left a wake that washed up and soaked my backyard.” So Mike would cut the engine immediately and we would float over and apologize—yes, ma’am, and no, ma’am—hoping the mom wouldn’t make that call. Even though Mike went on to become a minor criminal and confidence man, he was polite as pie when it came to accepting a dressing-down from the neighbors.

Even though we were allowed to fend for ourselves for a few hours after school, in the summer my mom didn’t feel comfortable leaving us alone for an entire day. In addition to...