Chase says she has always been one to experiment with new ideas. After four years of “confinement” at Miss Porter’s, a New England preparatory school, Chase says she was ready to explore unconventional career paths.

Her first destination was a fashion school in Oregon. “Let’s just say it was far from Paris, the fashion capital of the world,” Chase recalls.

“It was a joke academically. Most of the graduates went on to factory jobs, putting in zippers for the rest of their lives,” she adds.

After a year at Middlebury College—“too rustic, I was too feminine for them”—and another year at Wellesley College—“I didn’t fit in with most of the girls there”—Chase transferred to Harvard in fall 1976.

“I had wanted to go to Harvard always,” she says. “I am very strong willed. It took me three applications, but I finally got in.”

Yet after flipping through the pages of Nantucket Open House Cookbook, some might wonder how Chase managed to blend her academic curiosity with her love of fine food—how she succeeded in transforming a A.B. degree from Harvard, magna cum laude, into comprehensive knowledge of pumpkin prosciutto and Parmesan lasagna.

As an undergraduate, Chase says she balanced her coursework in European intellectual history with her love of experimenting with new recipes in an Adams House student kitchen. During her two years here, she also worked at a French restaurant in the Garage on Mount Auburn Street and cooked weekly dinner parties for a Cambridge host.

Chase recalls that Julia Childs, her idol, lived across the street from her boss.

“I kept hoping I would get to knock on her door and borrow a cup of sugar,” she says.

Childs served as more of an example than any history professor Chase had encountered.

Chase’s passion for cooking even overshadowed her senior thesis, “Chaos as a Form of Theory.” She remembers her formidable stack of thesis research “paled in comparison” to the even more impressive pile of Gourmet magazines lying nearby in her room.

“Whenever I got into the kitchen, I had this feeling of knowing that this was exactly what I wanted to do,” Chase says.

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

Chase rejects the notion that success is derived from a formula.

After graduation, she considered submitting applications to business school, medical school and law school. Ultimately, she says she “didn’t want acceptance into one of these places to determine the course of my life.”