Ms. Regan grew up with three older sisters on a 10-acre farm near Merrillville, Ind. Her bedroom had plywood floors, and the basement always flooded. The barn was crammed with used restaurant equipment, coffee cans filled with old parts and an abandoned light-blue Chevy, where she used to sit and fantasize she was on a date with a pretty girl. An outsider observing her young life, she wrote, might have bet she’d grow up to be an alcoholic transgender trucker carny.

Her mother liked to read Gourmet magazine and make her own pasta. Her father, a steelworker who never met a vegetable he didn’t want to grow, saw early on that she had a knack for finding the last ripe dewberry on a bush.

In an arresting passage in her book, she describes the day he taught her to hunt for chanterelles. She was about 5, and so focused on the task that she lost track of him. A drunk uncle who she recalls was always telling her what a pretty little girl she was, picked her up from behind and carried her into a dilapidated cabin. A family friend was inside, saving her, perhaps, from something terrible. He took her back to her father. As they headed to the car with their bags of mushrooms, a tornado spun through the sand and swept the family to the ground. When they finally made it home, her father placed her on a stool next to the stove and taught her how to carefully cook the chanterelles with red wine and butter.

“This was the day I slighted fate and became a chef,” she wrote.