Cooking as Fast as I Can (12 page)

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 Mis
sissippi 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.

We were ushered into another room to wait while Prudhomme and the other judges deliberated. I sat and amused myself, adding up the combined years of cooking experience my competitors boasted; I came up with over a century. We were called back in and stood in a long row, our hands clasped behind our backs. Prudhomme and one of the organizers walked toward my end of the line, and suddenly a medal hung on a thick red, white, and blue ribbon was being draped around my neck. I was so shocked. I thought this must be some runner-up prize, some thanks-for-playing award. But no, I had won.

My picture appeared in the
Clarion-Ledger
. In my chef whites, the medal hanging around my neck, a big grin on my face, I presented my winning plate to the camera.

Winning the Taste of Elegance confirmed that I was on the right path, but nothing changed for a while. Paul Prudhomme didn't call me the next day and beg me to come and work for him. I went to work, then came home and tried to re-create the specials of the day. I got obsessed for a bit with perfecting roast chicken, a simple dish that can be the most delicious thing you've ever tasted or dry and completely depressing. I must have been about eighteen chickens into the process when I opened the paper one morning and saw an ad for a book-signing that night down in Natchez, a two-hour drive. Julia Child was coming with her new cookbook,
The Way to Cook
.

I worshipped Julia Child. My brother Chris and I had watched
The French Chef
when we were kids. I always thought Chris might become a chef. He worshipped Justin Wilson, the “cooking Cajun,” and walked around saying, “I gar-on-tee it's good!” My parents had given me both volumes of
Mastering
on consecutive Christmases, and I studied them as if they were sacred texts. Like so many other people, both home cooks and aspiring professionals, I felt a special affinity with Julia. I had a hunch that if I could just ask her advice about how I should proceed, she would be able to help me chart my future course.

I told my mom and grandmom to drop what they were doing and cancel their afternoon plans, we were going on a road trip. They obliged—a testament to how supportive my family was, the degree to which they got on board whenever I got a wild hair. Which was fairly frequently.

We arrived at the book signing in plenty of time, but the line was out the door. I'd once read in a magazine article that Julia traveled with a minder. She was one of those people who was truly interested in others, and the fear was that Julia would fall into conversation with the first person in line to have her book signed. The minder kept the line moving.

Julia was a few months from her eightieth birthday, but she had the energy of a woman decades younger. As the line dwindled I watched the grace with which she greeted her fans. I felt sure that if her minder didn't rush me along, she would speak to me.

After the last person had closed her newly signed book, thanked Julia, and moved off, Julia capped her pen and straightened up. I placed myself in front of her.

“Mrs. Child,” I began. Then whatever smooth speech I had prepared about myself and my ambitions evaporated. “I want to cook.”

She sized me up, then without hesitation said, “Then you must go to school. The Culinary Institute of America is the Harvard of culinary schools. Make it your number one.” Julia warmed to the subject and went on about the joys and tribulations I'd face if I chose this life path. Her minder looked at her watch at least a dozen times, but Julia was on a roll. She encouraged me, saying the culinary life was the best life there was, but also warned me that it was brutal and competitive. “It's a man's world,” she said. “You must know this. But be stubborn and intractable in your determination and success will be inevitable.”

The next morning, swooning with optimism, I called the Culinary Institute of America for an application.

nine

I
was twenty-six years old when I loaded up my car and drove north to Hyde Park, New York. The Fiat was a memory, and now I drove a more sensible Honda that Grandmom gave me when she was no longer able to drive. I was fired up. My inspirational conversation with the great Julia Child fueled me as I made my application then settled in to wait. I knew I didn't quite meet the requirements, which were stricter then than they are now. My college GPA was good, but they also liked you to have at least a year of experience cooking professionally. I was short a few months, but I hoped that winning the Taste of Elegance would make up for it.

When I received my acceptance, I was only marginally surprised. I felt like I was on a roll. My life had truly begun! I dutifully hassled with the student loan people, then braced myself to talk through the situation with Hannah. We had been together about two and a half years by then, and I was well aware that I often took advantage of her laid-back nature. I didn't want her to break up with me, but I also knew it was a lot to ask her to agree to a long-distance relationship. She was unfazed by my decision, and believed in my future as a chef wholeheartedly. “
Go
,” she said. “Do what you have to do, and I'll be waiting for you when you get back.”

The Culinary Institute of America was twelve hundred
miles away from Swan Lake Drive. As I drove across Alabama and Tennessee, then up through Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, it occurred to me that I had never been north. I had lived in Mississippi my entire life, and the few times I'd traveled, it had either been west to Texarkana, or to Europe. I didn't think it would make much difference. I'd never understood how vast and diverse our country truly is.

Hyde Park struck me at first glance as cold and formal, the light silvery and sad. The air didn't smell like dry grass and magnolia blossoms, but like something industrial. The Culinary Institute was housed in a former Jesuit seminary on the banks of the Hudson River, a huge brick building with white columns. A lot of people found it elegant and stately, but I thought it was imposing and unnerving. I knew I would be living in a dorm, but once I was standing in the middle of my room with its twin bed, four-drawer dresser, desk, and chair, I was filled with misgivings. Had I actually signed up for this? The last and only time I'd lived in a dorm was my first semester at Hinds Community College with Sandy, when half the time I was drunk, but at least it was with my best friend. Now I was halfway across America in another crappy little room, in the company of strangers.