Cora Cat - Cooking as fast as I can: a chefs story of family, food, and forgiveness

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my incredibly gifted writer, Karen Karbo. Thank you for nourishing my stories with the ultimate deference and care, for hearing my life without judgment but with empathy over many great tuna-jalapeo melts. You got it just right.

To my mom, Virginia: you are always a beacon of light in my life. I am eternally grateful that you adopted me and made me always feel safe, loved, and chosen. I love you, Mo. To my father, Spiro, who I am sure is bragging to God right now about his girl: I miss you every day, Daddy. To Joanne: thank you for caring for me for nine months, giving me life, and then searching for twenty-one years. You never gave up on me. I love you.

To my grandmother Alma: you continue to be my angel and watch over me; these last couple of years I could have used you a little more, but I know you are there. To Randy and Carla: thank you for always being there for me and our family; you are my parents, too. To my brothers, Mike and Chris: my love and respect is immense. Jeff, Carrie, Jennifer Ann, Jason, Kim, and Michelle: I am so proud you are my brothers and sisters. To my awesome nieces and nephews, Morgan, Nicholas, Alexi, Anna, Andrew, Paxton, and Hallie: dream the biggest dreams, because you canyou willmake them happen, end of story. To my godparents, Taki and Maria: you have always loved me unconditionally and inspired me to go out into the world.

To my extended family and friends everywhereyou know who you are: thank you for your love and your support.

Thank you to Shannon Welch, my superb, brilliant editor, for believing that my life was interesting enough to fill a book, and for creating a book I can really be proud of. Many thanks to you and the entire team at Scribner!

To Jan Miller and Nena Dupree, my book agents at Dupree Miller: thank you for all the pep talks and encouragement, and for all of your tireless work and dedication.

To Tyler Goff, my talented plate-juggling assistant: thank you for the ridiculously great work you do every day on my behalf.

To Barbara Karrol: thank you for your brilliant counsel, continuing friendship, and, last, your endurance.

Thank you to all my business partners at HBF, Hojeij Branded Foods. I want to extend a special thanks to Regynald G. Washington, the CEO of my fan club, for your belief in my talent over the years. Thank you to my teams at the Cat Coras Kitchen and Cat Coras Gourmet Market airport restaurants at San Francisco International, Houston, Salt Lake City, and, as of this writing, Atlanta, as well as my international partners and team at Ocean by Cat Cora on Sentosa Island, Singapore, and Resorts World Sentosa (RWS). Thank you all for creating hugely successful restaurants with me and for being the day-to-day supreme teams!

To my partners at Grecian Delight: thank you for your dedication to quality and loyalty.

I want to thank my partners Sherry Villanueva and Brian Kelly at Bird Dog Mercantile in Santa Barbara, and our rocking team at BDM!

I want to thank my legal teams at Barnes and Thornburg and Manatt, and thanks also to my teams at UTA, 3Arts, and ID PR.

To any other subjects of this book who were at one time either hurt by me or who hurt me, I give the gift of this quotation:

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didnt leave my bitterness and anger behind, Id still be in prison.

Nelson Mandela

I am free.

CAT CORA grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, attended the Culinary Institute of America, and worked in New York City before traveling overseas to apprentice in Europe with world-renowned French chefs Georges Blanc and Roger Verg. After the Food Network discovered her in 1999, she went on to become the first female Iron Chef. She is the founder of the charitable organization Chefs for Humanity, and she has built a brand that includes food lines, cookware, and restaurants around the globe. She lives in Santa Barbara, California, with her wife and four sons. For more information, please visit CatCora.com.

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one

I spent the first week of my life at the Mississippi Childrens 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 appearancenot me. Less than a minute later my birth mother hollered, The baby! The babys 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 mothers knees, still tied by my umbilical cord, screaming my head off. I wasnt waiting until my birth mother had been settled in her room, wasnt waiting for the doctor to arrive, wasnt 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 theyd filed papers to adopt another child. They were an upstanding middle-class coupleshe a nurse, he a teacherwho 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 Childrens 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 woodsa 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 wed sucked on earlier. It was definitely better than kissing second-grader Johnny Purvis.