Cooking as Fast as I Can

by Cat Cora

  I pulled out all the stops. Olive oil roasted artichokes with shaved Reggiano cheese. Sliced prosciutto and lightly grilled peaches with a drizzle of rich vincotto. Pillowy potato-truffle gnocchi with fresh summer truffles and light cream sauce, topped with more truffles. Succulent lemon-and-herb-roasted chicken, the juices still running. Fresh pulled mozzarella, still warm and weeping milk, that melted the moment it touched our tongues.

  We drank wine and flirted over antipasti, then sat down to a beautifully set table. I was proud of myself for thinking about the table setting ahead of time, because it would have been criminal to break the mood with the need to locate place mats and clean flatware. Did we make it past the second course? I have no memory. What I do recall is the movie moment when I stood up, pulled her up by her hands, swept our glasses and plates to the floor, and pushed her onto the table. I straddled her, and after some desperate kissing and groping, she simply stood up, me with my legs wrapped around her waist, and carried me into the bedroom.

  Lorilynn came home a few hours later, very annoyed at the mess we left on the dining room floor, and the moans and cries that issued from my bedroom all night long. That was surely the epic sex of my life, and I wish I could report that Carmen and I had one of those great passionate affairs that come along once or twice in a lifetime. We went out a few more times after that, but it was clear the meal had been more of an aphrodisiac than I’d ever imagined.

  Now that I could pay her, I set up weekly phone appointments with Robin. I gave her the basics of my childhood abuse, and I came to understand the depths of my shame. I remembered things I’d worked hard to forget. How AH said my parents would be disgusted with me if I ever told them what we were doing. Meaning, of course, what he was doing to me. He’d used that word, “disgusted.” A word so powerful that it stuck. Deep down, I was disgusted with myself. For how many years had I hurled myself into clubs, classes, training, working in an effort to escape this? Cooking, my vocation and life’s work, was conveniently physically demanding and all-consuming. I’d do sixteen-hour days in a hundred-degree kitchen and three hundred covers over soul-searching any day of the week, but now it was time to stop and examine the very thing that had driven me all these years: proving that I was good enough.

  They say that cooking is love. The love in question might be for earth’s bounty, or the perfection required to assure that every plate leaving the kitchen is flawless, or the stamina, discipline, and fortitude required to cook at the highest levels. Maybe it’s love for the people you are nurturing with your food, or the ancient, communal experience of breaking bread. Before I began working with Robin, I secretly believed I cooked because without a plate of delicious food to offer someone, I was essentially unlovable.

  After our May opening I worked six months without two consecutive days off. Whenever I called home Alma got on the phone and forced me to admit my sixteen-hour days had actually inched upward to eighteen-hour days. After my mom earned her PhD and came back home, no one saw any reason why Alma should leave.

  She was ninety-six by then and saw no point in mincing words. I was a fool to work so hard, she said, and to ensure that I would take some R and R she was sending me some money to go visit Lorilynn, who’d just landed a great job on the island of Lanai, in Hawaii. Alma liked to say that her attitude about money was that when her purse was open, it was wide open, but then it slammed shut. Meaning, when she was feeling generous she was very generous. She deemed my exhaustion a crisis, and opened her purse wide. I was bowled over by her compassion. I can be stubborn and disagreeable, but it never occurred to me to cross Alma. After ensuring that Max, my sous chef, would be able to cover the restaurant, I bought my ticket, took the shuttle to SFO, and got on the plane.

  Meanwhile, back on Swan Lake Drive, someone with good if not well-thought-out intentions had given Alma a swivel chair for her desk for Christmas. For some time Alma had had trouble getting in and out of chairs, and moving them up or away from the table. Alma was overjoyed with her present, went to sit down, the chair seat bobbled beneath her, and she fell, breaking her hip.

  I was waiting for my return flight at the Honolulu airport and called home to let my parents know I was getting ready to board. My dad answered, and assuming that I was already home in California, mentioned Alma’s fall and that now she was in the hospital.

  I got hysterical. I was so far away, and Alma was so old. I stood crying noisily outside the newspaper stand. I wiped my eyes, then saw a familiar face across the concourse: Chase, the server at Postino with whom I’d had a fling, and who’d become a good friend. He was there with his mother, also traveling back to the mainland. He rushed over and took me by the shoulders.

  “Cat, hey hey hey, what’s going on?” he said.

  “It’s my grandmom. She broke her hip and she’s in the hospital,” I blubbered.

  “Aw!” said Chase, wrapping me in his arms. “It’ll be okay! It’ll be okay!”

  Why do we always say that when we have no idea what we’re talking about?

  Alma came through the operation better than her doctors expected. By then a few days had passed and I was back at Postino. I called my mom during a break.

  “You don’t need to come home,” she said. “She’s stable and improving. Just call her and say hi and tell her you’re thinking about her.”

  “Mom, I should be there.”

  “Just wait. She’s going to be fine.”

  My impulse was to go back into the kitchen, tell Max to take over, drive to the airport, and take the first plane out. It was just the sort of thing I would do, but I told myself to stay put. My mom had seen hundreds if not thousands of people at all stages of recovery and decline, and she was sitting at her mother’s bedside. Surely she knew better than me. Plus, I’d just returned from a long vacation in restaurant time—a week—and was in charge of service that night. I couldn’t up and just leave.

  The next day I called Alma during a break. Her heart was old and weak, and I could hear that she was struggling to breathe, and I knew without anyone having to tell me that she was in her final moments. I controlled my sobs enough to tell her what she’d meant to me, that no one had ever loved and supported me the way she had. I was only where I was in life because she had introduced me to the nurturing magic of good food. I told her that when I thought of my best friend, it was the image of her face that came to mind.

  I could tell when she’d gone. Just like that, it was clear there was no one on the other end of the line. I sat with the receiver to my ear for I don’t know how long. I stood up and closed the door to my office, then exhaled a great gulping sob. I could feel my swollen eyes, my raw throat. My head was throbbing with the sheer exertion of it all. I had known people who had died before—a childhood friend who’d committed suicide, a pair of friends from high school who’d died in a car crash, a boy I’d liked who’d died from leukemia—all tragedies to be sure, but it was nothing like this. Without Alma, how would I go on?

  One thing you can always count on in this life: people have to eat. You may be barely upright, but dinner service still begins at five thirty. Fish needs to be boned, onions chopped, stock made, sauce reduced and deglazed, orders expedited, food plated. As a partner in Postino and also the executive chef, my job was largely managerial. My tools were lists on a clipboard and the telephone. But Max, my sous chef, knew that some days the only thing that got me through was making food. When I emerged from the office, eyes red and puffy, he stepped aside without question. I picked up a knife and started prepping. I julienned carrots. I chopped up everything in the kitchen that could be chopped, and then, at around midnight, Max placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Chef, service has been over for a while. We got this.”

  Grief is never what you expect. All that sobbing in the movies and on TV, and then, after the commercial break, the healing begins. In my experience, losing someone is more like a lifetime of open-wound management. So much of who I am is because of Alma. I miss her every day.

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nbsp; In 1999 my birthday fell on the day before Easter, April 3. Wild-haired Alexa had wound up becoming a good friend. She’s since gotten married, and she and her then boyfriend, Tim, were going skiing at Lake Tahoe with their families and they invited me along. I was still in a fragile state, and didn’t dare venture too far away from the kitchen. We were serving a special brunch menu on Sunday and I saw no point in making the three-hour drive on Friday night, just to turn around and come back Saturday afternoon. Had it been any other weekend, I might have been able to talk my way out of it, but three months had passed since Alma’s death, enough time for me to accept that working every day until I was also in the grave wasn’t going to bring her back or make my life better, so I allowed myself to be persuaded.

  We drove up in the dark, and when we woke up it was snowing too hard to ski. Rather than sit in the condo and stare at each other, we went to the lodge. At 9:00 a.m. the bar opened. The snow came down thicker and faster, creating whiteout conditions, so there would be no skiing for the foreseeable future. As it was also my birthday, I saw no reason not to order myself a Corona Light. The lodge was more crowded than usual, given the bad weather, and I found a spot next to a two-top, where a couple was seated, a lanky blonde and her boyfriend or husband. Or so I presumed.

  The heavy snow this late in the season gave the lodge a festive air. I wasn’t the only one knocking back beers before lunch. The blonde asked where we were from, and we all got to chatting. We ordered another round. I was feeling pretty warm and friendly. Damn if that blonde wasn’t just my type. She had bright brown eyes, an elegant nose, and a dazzling smile. She was feminine and very pretty, but also looked like a woman of substance, one who would give you a run for your money. Was she flirting with me? With her boyfriend or husband sitting right there?

  Suddenly, he pushed back his chair back and excused himself.

  “Is that your boyfriend or husband or whatever?” I blurted out.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I don’t date men.”

  “Really? Neither do I. Are you seeing anyone?”

  “Nope, completely single.”

  Her name was Jennifer Johnson. She told me she worked as a nanny. Geoff, the man she was with, was her employer, along with his wife, Laura. They had one little girl. Then Geoff returned from the bathroom and looked from her to me and back. “Wow. You guys move fast.”

  fifteen

  After that snowy, half-drunk morning at the ski lodge at Tahoe, Jennifer and I saw each other every day. We’d fallen in love at first sight, and she gave me things I hadn’t even known I’d needed. On our first official date she took me to a toy store. “I can tell you’re too serious and need to remember how to play,” she said. We adored one another, and that somehow gave us the magical powers to find time for each other even given our breakneck work schedules, her a full-time nanny, me at Postino from an hour before it opened to the day’s last floor mop.

  Born in Inglewood, southwest of Los Angeles, and raised in the Bay Area city of Fremont, Jennifer has always struck me as the consummate California girl. Her friends nicknamed her Tommy Girl, because she was a tomboy and was crazy for soccer. She played AYSO club soccer throughout high school, and after she graduated was pretty much done with school. She wasn’t interested in academics, and after college she worked at Costco for a while before hooking up with a girl who had a young son. She hung out with the little boy and babysat him once in a while and discovered that she enjoyed it. Not long after that she started working as a nanny.

  There’s an old joke I’ll try to tell even though Jennifer will say I’m the world’s worst joke teller.

  What do lesbians call the second date?

  Moving day.

  About six months after we met (roughly a hundred years in lesbian time), Jennifer and I found ourselves a little one-bedroom apartment in Oakland on Vermont Street. She brought her shepherd mix, Sierra, and suddenly we were just like a lot of same-sex couples in the Bay Area, doting over our furry child. Jennifer was still working as a nanny for Laura and Geoff, and they traveled a lot. She was away as much as she was home, which meant she could handle my sometimes crazy hours.

  One day Michael asked me whether I’d be interested in representing Postino at Taste of San Francisco, an annual charity event whose proceeds go toward ending childhood hunger in America. I said hell yes. Because that was the kind of happy I was then. I cannonballed into everything.

  I was assigned a spot between two other chefs in the big exhibit hall. The place was crazy packed with chefs, some very famous, some up-and-coming, bartenders in dress shirts, sleeves rolled up, pouring signature cocktails, winemakers, bakers, and pastry chefs. I showed up in my whites, my hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail. I put some yellow tulips in a glass vase on my table to jazz up my station.

  I don’t recall what I was demonstrating that day, but I remember I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Postino had an open kitchen, and I’d grown accustomed to working in front of people, making conversation as I plated. I liked interacting with folks, and as the daughter of Spiro and Virginia Lee Cora of Jackson, Mississippi, I was raised to be as polite and congenial as could be.

  None of this was lost on Joey Altman, who passed the time by my table for a quarter of an hour. Joey Altman was another chef who had six things going at once, a handsome bro who looked like the president of the fraternity. He’d worked at Stars, a landmark restaurant in San Francisco back in the day, and opened Miss Pearl’s Jam House, where he wowed the persnickety San Francisco crowd in the late eighties with his African- and Caribbean-inspired fare. He played in a blues-rock band with a bunch of other chefs, and hosted a local cooking show called Bay Café on KRON4, the NBC affiliate.

  Not long after Taste of San Francisco I received a call in the kitchen at Postino.

  “Hey, Joey Altman here. I was thinking you’d be good on the show; why don’t you come on?”

  “Great,” I said.

  Like most cooking shows at the time, Bay Café had a production budget of about forty-seven cents per episode. I was required to provide my own food. Bay Café was a “dump and stir” show, no theatrics, rival teams, or time clock. I demonstrated how to make pine-nut-crusted veal scaloppini with romesco sauce, crisp garlic, and basil, a favorite dish on the Postino menu.

  Until now, I’d never had a burning desire to be a TV star. Truly I wasn’t hyperaware of any food personalities other than Julia Child, who despite being older than God had just launched a new show on PBS, Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home with my other culinary heartthrob, Jacques Pépin. Julia always liked to say that she was first and foremost an educator, and I saw what she meant. She happened to be very entertaining, but her goal of appearing on television was not entertainment, but to show people how to make great food in their own kitchens.

  The task of making a dish in front of a camera turned out to be weirdly and deeply satisfying. The challenge of working with the food, describing what I was doing, and moving around the kitchen set in a way that was both natural and precise, all while striving to be entertaining, was exhilarating. I felt like a unicycle rider who’s just discovered she has an aptitude for juggling a peach, a bowling pin, and a chain saw. The experience also conjured up the unalloyed joy I’d felt performing in the Follies in high school, when I’d felt the simple and all-consuming satisfaction of being fully engaged in a production.

  When I finished the segment, Joey Altman told me my timing was impeccable. The cameraman said he couldn’t believe I hadn’t done this sort of thing before. I put some of their compliments down to the simple need to boost the confidence of the talent, but I felt confident enough to request a tape of the episode, which I then shot off to the Food Network, feeling giddy as I addressed the padded envelope and took it to the post office.

  The Food Network was still finding its feet back in the late nineties. It had one hit show with Emeril Lagasse, Emeril Live! but was still unclear whether there was a big audience for cooking shows, aside from bleary-eyed mothers who�
��d just put their toddlers down for a nap. The network was scrambling to expand its audience, throwing pretty much every kind of food-related program they could think of against the wall to see if it would stick. There were shows profiling iconic restaurants around the nation and shows that took famous chefs (or, at that time, any chef they could get) to their homeland where they would cook the food they grew up on. There were food news shows and food game shows, and finally, a show starring Mario Batali, Molto Mario. In 1999, only a few weeks before I met Jennifer, East Meets West, hosted by Ming Tsai, a Chinese American chef born in Newport Beach, California, won an Emmy, beating out both Martha Stewart and my beloved Julia Child.

  The good news for me, an unknown chef from Northern California without my own restaurant, cookbook, or shtick (“Bam!”), was that my tape would not be tossed onto the pile with hundreds of others, waiting for a bleary-eyed unpaid intern to fast-forward through it. The network was actively seeking new talent, and two weeks later, I received a phone call from someone whose name I’ve clean forgotten, asking whether I wanted to fly to New York to be a guest on In Food Today, hosted by David Rosenthal, where “the world’s top chefs stop by to share their secrets.”

  My big draw, as far as I could tell, was being a Mississippi girl, because their earth-shattering idea was to have me demonstrate how to make chicken and dumplings and fried pickles. I assure you that at this juncture I was more than happy to be pigeonholed as a stereotypical southern cook. I was so tickled and grateful I thought my head would twirl off. I convinced the suits who managed Postino to give me a few days off to fly to New York. Wasn’t this a fabulous new development for the restaurant? Having their executive chef appear on the Food Network? They were unmoved, but gave me the time off anyway.

  I was well into my thirties now, grateful for all of the opportunities I’d had and proud of my accomplishments, but that mind-blowing experience of one thing effortlessly and obviously leading to another, a life free of the feeling of stuttering and false starts, had thus far eluded me.