Growing up on her parents' farm in Oldham County, about 25 miles north of Louisville, Kathy Cary wasn't thinking about cooking caviar tartlets at the James Beard House some day or having her recipes featured in Gourmet magazine or being a pioneering and celebrated chef.

She was too young for that. But she was old enough to be inspired by the world of food -- by "the essence of watching things grow and then enjoying the fruits of it" and by the cooking of African-American women who worked for her grandmother. "They were fabulous cooks. No recipes. How they made yeast rolls, how fried chicken was done, summer peach pie -- the simplicity of it, and just the magic of what it turned around to be. And there were no books. It was all from their taste, their memories, the feel. I firmly believe I was taught by some experts without any culinary degree."

Born in 1953, the youngest of three children (she has older twin sisters), Cary was five when her parents moved from Louisville to the farm. Her family grew a lot of its own produce there, and her father, who was in the liquor business, owned Black Angus cattle.

Cary's culinary career began after she graduated from high school and moved to Washington, D.C., to find work. She got a job selling clothes at a Georgetown boutique, and she took Cordon Bleu cooking classes and assisted the teacher, Barton Connett, a woman who'd trained at the Cordon Bleu in Paris. With Connett's recommendation, Cary began catering for well-to-do fellow Cordon Bleu students. She was soon hired as lunch chef at a prominent restaurant called The Big Cheese, where she "learned a lot about the restaurant world."

In 1974 a "family crisis" over the marriage of one of her sisters brought her back to Louisville, where she ran across construction worker and musician Will Cary, whom she had known growing up.

She spent the next few years as chef for The Fig Tree, a downtown Louisville restaurant; teaching cooking classes at Bellarmine College; working as fashion director for a department store; and catering. And she "got married in there at one point" to Will Cary.

In October 1979, Cary opened a catering and minimal take-out business in a small, 800-square-foot rental space on Bardstown Road her husband had found. She called it La Peche, "the peach" in French. "To me the perfection of the peach -- taste, color, texture -- if you're talking about food, I just picked the most perfect example of the perfection of anything you could actually smell, touch, or consume."

La Peche proved so successful that Cary spent most of the next decade expanding her business. She took over adjacent businesses in her building: a hardware store, a dog-grooming service, and a typewriter store. Then she (and her husband) bought the two-story brick building. She put a bakery and offices upstairs. And in February 1988 she opened a restaurant downstairs and named it Lilly's after her 2 1/2 year-old daughter.

Even after opening Lilly's, Cary continued catering and take-out from her building. Around 1991 she opened a second La Peche in Holiday Manor, a suburban shopping center about a 15-miinute drive away.

Her business now, Kathy Cary Catering Inc., includes Lilly's restaurant, which seats 120 people; La Peche Holiday Manor, a 50-seat cafe and take-out store; and La Peche catering, which she operates primarily out of the Bardstown Road location.

What made Cary's company succeed? For starters, something fundamental: "the strong work ethic that comes with the family genes. My father said I'm blessed and cursed at the same time by it. I said, "I know it."

Success also came from being ahead of the curve and taking advantage of opportunity. "We're one of a kind. Nobody was doing gourmet-to-go take-out in this area. For the consumer, back in '79, the early '80s, the fact that you could walk in a store and get veal piccata and asparagus and yeast rolls and caramel cake and go home and eat, that's, 'Wow! And I can order that? I can call on the phone and order food for 20 -- and good food, homemade food?'

"Grocery stores copied us. Guys at Kroger were looking at La Peche Holiday Manor. Every day they were in there to figure out what we were doing. They came in with their chef coats."

Another reason for Cary's success has been her longstanding support for local farmers and her use of regional produce and meats. She organized her first meeting with local farmers, restaurant chefs, and representatives of the Kentucky Agriculture Department within a year or two of opening Lilly's, she said. Her efforts, rooted in her family farm background, "got a lot of attention." Cary who's a member of the Community Farm Alliance, an organization promoting sustainable agriculture in Kentucky, estimates that from late spring until early fall 90 percent of the produce served at Lilly's is local.

Cary entered the national cooking scene with a flourish in March 1993 when she was invited to cook at the James Beard House, a prestigious culinary center in New York honoring the legendary American food writer, teacher, and cook. Her recipes had been featured on a couple of occasions in the New York Times (once by well-known chef/writer Pierre Franey), but the Beard House dinner was different.

"It was my first big national break," Cary said, "an event that changed my life. To get outside of Louisville and feed New York. Everything we took up there we literally took from here. I mean, all my ingredients. Even to decorate my hors d'oeuvre trays I took some limestone rock.

"One of my big things -- I was making homemade yeast rolls -- and I wanted to make sure that after I made them that we just quickly zipped throughout the Beard House. You know how yeast rolls smell out from the oven. You know, 15 minutes before the guests arrive to have the whole house smelling this way."

About 100 people attended the six-course dinner, which included Kentucky country ham with blue cheese and chives, Tennessee valley caviar tartlets, shrimp with a spicy chutney on cheese-grits cakes, Kentucky rabbit with spicy mushrooms and eggplant and spring watercress, and Shaker lemon tart. "It was a full house," Cary said. "It was just an amazing event. It was just this wonderful reassurance that I can do it."

The dinner gave Cary a national profile. She has been invited back to cook at the Beard House four times and has been nominated twice [three times as of spring, 2004] for a Beard Award as best chef of the Southeast. She's been featured in Bon Appetit, Gourmet -- which chose her as a "Great American Chef" -- Southern Living, Food & Wine, Wine & Spirits, and other magazines. She's appeared on the Today show, Martha Stewart's show (segments on Derby food), and several Food Network programs. And she's worked alongside celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck, Daniel Boulud, Jeremiah Tower, and Charlie Trotter.

Through the years her cooking has "kept evolving" but "staying close to home" and using regional foods have remained central to her. "Our food, it's everything from the down-home chicken pot pie to food that's been inspired by other parts of the world but interpreted here in Kentucky. I guess we're American...with ethnic twists."

In addition to Christmas, which Cary describes as "two months long," Derby is another intense period, "four days -- Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday." And Friday of Derby week is "probably our busiest financial day of the year. We are usually totally booked two months in advance for dinner that night."

On Saturday, Derby night, Cary has for the past 15 years closed Lilly's to the public and booked it only for private parties, charging up to $250 per person for a six-course dinner, wine, and tip. She also sells a lot of Oaks and Derby lunches -- 600 last year -- but that number, along with her Derby day brunches, has declined in the past few years.

Hectic times or normal ones, Cary is still a hands-on owner who puts in full workdays. She arrives at Bardstown Road around 8 a.m. and runs her kitchen (one of two in the building), cooking lamb shanks, chopping onions, baking garlic custard for a porcini soup, stuffing empanadas with rock shrimp, keeping an eye on a 20-gallon pot of chicken stock simmering on a 10-burner Vulcan range, scorching the tops of cr�me brulees with a hot meat pounder. She usually leaves -- her home is half a mile away -- around 5:30 p.m. and returns, often with her husband, around 7 p.m. to help in the front of the restaurant.

She cooks mostly for La Peche catering, often making more of a dish Lilly's can serve as a dinner special, and she prepares food for her Holiday Manor store. She's "not a line cook anymore." She has lunch and dinner chefs and a general manager, and she supervises 50 employees, about half of them full-time.

Cary keeps an eye on her bottom line. "I watch quality control," she said, "and I bark at food costs a lot, because that's how you make any kind of numbers at all." She estimates her expenses include 33 percent for food and 26 percent for labor.

That leaves only "a teeny-weenie bit for profit." And profits have been harder to come since September 11th, she said. "Since 9/11 everything's changed. Its what I predicted. People aren't going out as much. They pick up food and go home.... In the old days, we'd do 180 people Saturday nights at Lilly's. Now we do about 120."

Post 9/11, business at La Peche Holiday Manor has increased, and the store has become the financial "backbone" of Cary's company.

To keep herself centered and things in perspective, Cary often returns to her parents' Oldham County farm. "That's my therapy -- to get out and walk the creek, go with the dogs and walk around and be alone, silence."

Cary used to be a competitive runner. She ran four marathons -- three in New York City and one in Louisville -- with a best time, in New York, of 3:22. But after 9/11 she quit running regularly. "I mean it's odd, but I literally made a decision that after all that awful stuff I couldn't deal with being just by myself, so I went to the Humane Society and got a puppy. And that helped our entire family and our older dog." (Cary and her husband have two children, Lilly, now 18, and Will, 14.) She began walking for exercise with her dogs. But she still runs occasionally, and last year ran a 10K totally untrained and had a blast."

"I planned a lot of my menus -- for Beard or whatever -- running, just, you know, away from books, buildings, people. Just out there in the elements, because you're running 10, 12, miles and you...just get in this groove and start thinking about stuff."

That stuff includes a perennial question.

"You know, people ask why you're in this insane, wacky business. What keeps you going," Cary said. "It's still the passion of food and where it comes from. It's an artistic, creative outlet for me.... The brain never stops working, and that's the nice thing about trying to figure out something new to do with a dish or a new presentation or just reading something in a book or magazine. Things like that get you really excited. That's what keeps you going.... It's a way of life, this place."

-- Louis Guida