by Cat Cora
Over the years I’ve also gained an extended family through Joanne: a birth grandmother, Jessie; two aunts, Judy and Jan; an uncle, Webb; a half brother, Jason; a half sister, Kim; a niece, and a bushel of nephews. Joanne and her husband, Terrie, live a mere twenty minutes from Swan Lake Drive; to this day, whenever I find myself in Jackson we all get together. I call Joanne every Sunday, just as I do my mom. I never forget how lucky I am.
eight
I knew I loved food, and I knew that cooking made me feel settled and happy, but otherwise it wasn’t obvious that I’d make a life for myself in the culinary world. I was female, for one thing, and in the early 1990s female chefs were about as plentiful as female fighter pilots.
My Wikipedia entry amusingly reads: “After receiving her bachelor of science degree in exercise physiology and biology at the University of Southern Mississippi, she enrolled at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York.” It’s not untrue, but makes the journey sound so straightforward, as though I sashayed through my graduation in Hattiesburg in the sweltering June heat one day, then packed up my knives and sped on up to Hyde Park the next.
But real life provides very few clear-cut aha moments. And there was no moment of clarity or clear turning point when I knew I’d make a life in the kitchen. I struggled to figure out what to do with my life.
My mom and dad had gotten up at dawn and gone to work every day. They had taken second jobs and weekend shifts and earned extra college degrees, and still, I couldn’t quite figure out what adults did all day. Or, better put, what I was supposed to do all day, now that I had a college degree. I moved back in with my parents, a boomerang child before the term became popular.
It occurred to me that I could prolong my existential dilemma a bit longer by spending the summer backpacking around Europe. I’d been to Texas and a few other southern states, but otherwise I was undertraveled. My parents weren’t opposed, but they were not about to foot the bill, so I got a job.
I had never worked in a real restaurant, but I have a habit of going big when I set my mind to something. So, without a lick of experience, I somehow landed a job at what was at the time the top restaurant in town, a white-tablecloth place on State Street in downtown Jackson, not far from the Old Capitol Building. I began as a waitress, but also worked as a cocktail waitress and then bartender. But during slow times I always found myself wandering back into the kitchen. I loved to cook at home, but the chefs and cooks were clearly up to something very different. It seemed as if they were doing ten things at once, with confidence and an air of nonchalance. The plates of food they produced were as beautiful as they were delicious. At home I followed recipes—one of my all-time favorite cookbooks had been the classic spiral-bound, red-and-white-checked Betty Crocker—but these guys, and they were all guys, held all the information they needed in their heads. I was both impressed and intrigued and thought how great it would be to have all those skills at your disposal.
As I was learning to serve food, my personal life took on a grounded feeling I’d never known to that point. My mom had finished her PhD program and had returned to Swan Lake Drive. Alma, who was getting up there in years, had grown accustomed to living with us, and stayed on in her floral-wallpapered bedroom. She kept right on doing our laundry and turning out her spectacular desserts. Joanne, my birth mother, was a regular part of my life. Then I met Hannah.
I was twenty-three, and in the four years since I’d come out, Jackson had opened a few more gay bars. One night some friends and I found ourselves at a place called—I kid you not—Carpet World. I started chatting with a cute blond girl at the bar only to learn after twenty concentrated minutes of flashing my smile and fluttering my lashes that she was straight. She in turn introduced me to Hannah, who to my great surprise was dressed in the outfit of the hard-core Pentecostal holy roller: knee-length skirt, cotton blouse with Peter Pan collar, and a long braid down her back.
What on earth was a Pentecostal girl doing in a gay bar? My family was Greek Orthodox, and active in the church community. We were churchgoers, as many good southerners are, but as I was to learn, Hannah’s people were fervent, Bible-thumping Pentecostals, the type who spoke in tongues and practiced the laying on of hands. She’d spent her formative years in a trailer park in Slidell, Louisiana, a small town on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, with her parents and three sisters. Hannah moved to Jackson to live with her grandmother when she was in elementary school, and after she graduated from high school she got a job working for Allstate insurance company. She stayed with her grandma, and the thing that I found fascinating was that even though her people routinely damned her to hell for her sexual orientation, she just took it in stride.
Her parents begged her to talk to their pastor, and practically gave themselves hernias praying for her, but she would just smile and say no, thanks. I was impressed that she could stand her ground and be kind to her detractors at the same time.
It wasn’t love at first sight, but we grew into an easy friendship and eventually something more. We hung out with the same group of women, and often at the end of a party, or a night at a club, we would wind up together talking. Hannah was always the designated driver, and I always seemed to have my eye on her hot, straight best friend. One night I noticed that she’d cut her braid, had replaced her skirts with tight jeans, and was wearing mascara and lipstick. I saw she was pretty, with expressive eyes and a lovely smile.
New Orleans became our stomping grounds. Especially because after a night on the town we could crash at Hannah’s family’s place. Slidell was a mere thirty minutes from the city, over the I-10 Twin Span bridge, a trip that was always fueled by a peach daiquiri, extra shot, from one of Louisiana’s roadside drive-thru daiquiri shops.
We had our favorite gay bars, where I would usually try to pick up a hot little Dixie chick and Hannah would function as my wingman. She wasn’t happy seeing me with other girls, and would try to hook up herself, but without much success. After a night on the town there was usually a scene, with Hannah in tears and me racked with guilt, heartache all around. Eventually, Hannah tired of waiting for me and started seeing someone else. That got my attention real quick, and my feelings for her began to change.
I wish I could say that I saw her inner beauty before she started wearing lip gloss and curling her hair, but the truth is that only after her transformation did I realize maybe Hannah and I could be more than friends. Since the night we’d met she’d made no secret of her attraction to me, but over time I came to realize that I had someone special right under my nose, someone who loved me and would have my back.
Hannah, sweet and easygoing, was game for anything. Once I’d saved enough money, she thought nothing of quitting her job at Allstate and taking off for Europe for twelve weeks. Our itinerary was based on the places I’d dreamed about as a girl, lying on my belly on the living room floor, perusing my dad’s atlas: England and France, Spain and Portugal, Amsterdam, Switzerland and Germany, Italy and, of course, Greece.
We were on a strict budget, staying in youth hostels and one-star hotels. We purchased a Eurail pass and sometimes took an overnight train to save money. We ate the local bread, cheese, cured meat, and wine. If we ate out, it was usually street food. We dutifully phoned home once a week, but otherwise we were completely on our own. We were twenty-three. We traveled well together, a pair of pretty young things abroad, reveling in our adventures, which included not one but two incidents involving flashers—once in Naples and once in Saint-Tropez—and a misadventure that occurred on the train from Spain to Portugal.
Our Eurail pass was only good for economy class. It was mid-July and murderously hot. We sat in the last car with the train windows thrown open, dust, pollen, and flies circulating throughout the car. Hannah and I were tired and cranky. We bickered over something I’ve long since forgotten. I thought we could use a break and went to the bar car, where I ordered a sandwich and a cold beer. I struck up a conversation with a Spanish soldier. We passed
the time nursing our beers. In those days there were no bullet trains, and our train lumbered across the countryside, stopping at every small station along the way. Eventually there came an announcement that we were reaching Lisbon, and I bid him farewell and started back to my seat at the back of the train. Except there was no back of the train. Somewhere along the route the train had been decoupled, and Hannah and all my stuff were gone.
I sprinted back through the cars to find the Spanish soldier before he disappeared. Sweat poured down the side of my face and I could feel my pulse beating in my throat. I caught up with him, grabbed him, and told him what happened. He was unruffled, got off the train with me at the next stop, explained my predicament to the person in the ticket booth, and soon I was back on a train headed in the opposite direction. I was so relieved after having been so frantic that I bought myself another beer, stuck my head out the train window like a happy retriever, and enjoyed the ride all the way back.
When we reached the station, I spied Hannah on the platform with a policeman. I could see she had been crying, and I waved out the window, happy that I’d been so quick on my feet and solved the problem easily. Hannah was relieved to see me, but also wanted to bean me for getting us into this predicament in the first place.
The high point of the trip was our pilgrimage to Skopelos, Greece, the island of my ancestors. I felt like a southern girl through and through, but part of me was always aware that my dad’s side of the family was Greek. And not simply Greek immigrants who’d made their way from the Old Country to become Greek Americans who ran restaurants in Mississippi, but also mysterious and exotic aunts, uncles, and cousins who were born and died on the same small island in the Aegean.
Before Hannah and I had left, my dad arose in the predawn dark to make phone calls to Skopelos to arrange our visit. I remember awaking in the dark to hear him down the hall, speaking Greek to strangers who were not strangers at all, but family. The mere thought of it thrilled me to the core. Due east of the Pelion peninsula, the drumstick-shaped island of Skopelos is a mere thirty-seven square miles of mountainous terrain covered in pine and oak, and dotted with plum and almond orchards. Karagiozoses have lived here for centuries, in a house on a hillside that my aunts, uncles, and cousins called “grandfather’s house,” a modest white structure with a table outside beneath the olive trees, overlooking the blue-green sea.
When we arrived, my dad’s cousin’s wife, whom everyone called Aunt Demetra, had a spread waiting, the rustic table laid end to end with white platters of homemade bread, tangy tzatziki, spicy feta spread, artichoke hearts braised in lemon juice, and buttery, light spanakopita stuffed with fresh spinach and the most flavorful feta I’d ever eaten. Demetra was worried we were starving. Even though she spoke very little English, I watched her wring her hands a little, then she opened her palms toward a pair of wobbly chairs. She pushed the platters toward us, nodded, and smiled. Although we’d had breakfast before we’d boarded the ferry in Thessaloníki only a few hours before, we dug in. Without speaking the same language, our mutual happiness was apparent.
The next day we were introduced to my great-aunt Eleni, Dad’s uncle John’s wife, who lived in a tiny apartment overlooking the harbor, the best spot on the island. She brought us thick Greek coffee made in a briki pot and served with a spoon sweet—a thick dollop of syrupy fruit preserves—a traditional gesture of Greek hospitality. Maybe it was because we were tired of cheap hotels, cheap meals, and the general stresses of travel, but Aunt Eleni’s coffee and sweets, simple as they were, restored us. We felt nourished and cared for. Hannah and I stayed on Skopelos for only a few days, but it was long enough for me to glimpse something simple and profound: that the joy and satisfaction of making and sharing food, whether you are cooking and serving or receiving and enjoying, are universal. The passion my Greek relatives put into their food and the passion my southern family put into their food was the same. Good food, served with care, had the power to connect even people who didn’t speak the same language. I was so moved by this that I felt a goal begin to materialize. Since I’d graduated from college I’d felt at loose ends, but on the long flight home I kept coming back to the same idea, that I might be able to make a living cooking, providing this kind of experience for others.
After Hannah and I returned to the States I got a job at Amerigo, a casual Italian establishment on Old Canton Road not far from the country club. They served what passed as authentic Italian in Jackson: scampi, lasagna, pasta pomodoro, and spaghetti in a traditional red sauce with a jumbo meatball. I waited tables for a while, and when there was an opening for a cook, I put in for it.
Ideas kept me up at night. For a few fevered weeks, Hannah and I explored financing the purchase of Walker’s Drive-In in the arty Fondren district. It was classic Jackson, a modest box diner with a peony-pink neon sign, aqua front door with a pair of classic Art Deco portholes, and a lot of potential. It could not have been a bigger pipe dream, but my instinct about the place was flawless. James Beard Award finalist Derek Emerson would one day buy it and turn it into one of the coolest joints in Jackson.
Then we hatched a plan to open Jackson’s first Caribbean restaurant. Hannah drew up a business plan and I wrote the menus. I imagined curries and jerk shrimp, mango salsas, fried ripe plantains. For a solid month, after I got off my shift at Amerigo, I’d come home and shower, rinsing off the smells of olive oil, garlic, and oregano, and start my second shift, devising jerk rubs and experimenting with fruity Caribbean salsas. I fried up plantains and invited Taki and Maria over. I made jerk chicken skewers with brown sugar, soy sauce, and thyme. I added pineapple, red peppers, and jalapeños to the rub. Hannah and I put on our best outfits and met with local businessmen who’d invested in other restaurants, and also some investors Taki knew. They found our fevered ambition amusing, and every last one said no.
I remained weirdly undaunted. I should have been discouraged. It was now 1992 and the number of female restaurant owner-chefs I knew were exactly none. Certainly there were none in the South. I’d heard of Julia Child and Alice Waters, who wasn’t even Alice Waters yet, but merely the owner of the popular, upscale hippie bistro Chez Panisse. That was it. Like Marine Corps sniper, drag queen, and pope, executive chef was apparently a job only for men. Ironic, because many of the most bad-ass home cooks I knew were women, and the best, most-cherished recipes of most of the male cooks I know all came from their grannies.
Amerigo was my first cooking job. There I learned the steps of food prep, how to butcher meat and clean fish, and how to make basic sauces. Taki had introduced me to the art of sautéing, and now I got to practice it every day. After I had been there for about four months, a cooking competition called Taste of Elegance came to Jackson.
The kitchen manager at Amerigo, a jovial tweaker named Buddy, was hot to enter the contest and asked me to be his sous chef. I was competitive by nature and loved the idea of a contest, so I said yes. We met a few times about six weeks before the competition, but it was apparent from the beginning that we weren’t going to be able to make it work. He had a vision of a dish featuring venison sausage that sounded revolting, and he wasn’t open to any of my suggestions, so we parted ways.
Before I teamed up with Buddy, I’d had no intention of entering the contest on my own. I’d been working in the culinary world for a whopping four months, and some of the other chefs who were entering, among the best in Mississippi, had decades of experience. But now that he’d cut me loose I was determined to enter. Why not? What did I have to lose?
One of the things I’d noticed at my aunt’s table in Greece was that her simple yet spectacular food was made using mostly local ingredients. In 2015 we take this philosophy for granted, but in the early 1990s the idea of using indigenous food in season was unheard of. If you could get blueberries grown in another hemisphere in the dead of winter, there was no reason not to make pie.
I decided to see what I could do with traditional southern ingredients that my family and friends loved�
�pork loin, crawfish, and pecans. My dish evolved as I practiced cooking the various elements. Every night after work I came home and cooked; sometimes I didn’t get started until midnight. While my family slept I would practice roasting pork loin, trying to figure out the perfect temperature and cooking time, so that it would be juicy but not pink. I wanted to make a champagne beurre blanc sauce, and polished Julia Child’s recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I must have made it a half dozen times, striving to ensure it wasn’t too oily and didn’t break. I didn’t know quite what to do with the pecans: toast them and sprinkle them on top? Add them to the beautiful pale yellow champagne beurre blanc?
The contest was held in a conference room at the big Mississippi Trade Mart, part of the state fairgrounds complex. We prepped our dishes in our home kitchens, then cooked on site.
I settled on a spinach-and-crawfish-stuffed pork loin with champagne toasted pecan butter sauce, and only after I plated my entry did I learn the judge was one of the most famous chefs in the nation, and easily one of the most respected chefs in the South—the great Paul Prudhomme.
There were only a few genuine celebrity chefs then. James Beard and Julia Child were perhaps the best known, followed closely by Prudhomme, the man who’d pretty much single-handedly popularized Cajun and Creole cooking. Upon learning the identity of the judge, my confidence deflated like a balloon. My dish featured ingredients near to his heart. I surmised that either that would make my dish more appealing, or he would judge me more harshly.
I was the only female chef in the competition. Together with the other nine male chefs, we brought our dishes to a long table where Prudhomme would conduct a blind taste test. Buddy was there with his venison sausage. He smirked when he noticed me. I ignored him, told myself that even though I didn’t have a chance, it was good practice.