‘Good Times’ Author Cooks Up Tales With Food

As manager of John F. Kerry’s cookie store, Sarah Leah Chase ’79 remembers slicing her hand while chopping a rock-hard, frozen slab of butter back in the days before either she or Kerry, now a Mass. senator and Democratic presidential candidate, were popular icons.

Chase—author of a bestselling cookbook—recalls seeking solace from the Vietnam vet and store owner, but Kerry merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “Oh, that’s nothing compared to what I saw in Vietnam.”

He even paraded her around the Faneuil Hall kitchen, accepting wagers on the number of stitches she would need, Chase says. Soon after the incident, Chase says she decided to leave Kerry’s store and go into business for herself.

Since then, Chase has forged an impeccable reputation for herself in the cooking industry, hobnobbing with household names such as Julia Childs, Jacques Pepin and Martha Stewart. She also opened and ran for 10 years a successful Nantucket food business and serves as culinary spokesperson for Butterball Turkey and Hellmann’s Mayonnaise.

Chase’s reputation in food circles derives from her first cookbook, The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, which she co-authored in 1984 and immediately hit The New York Times bestseller list. She has continued to write, penning an additional five cookbooks to date along with her first, which together have sold 1.5 million copies nationwide.

In these cookbooks and in her weekly food columns for The Nantucket Spectator, Chase prides herself on blending episodes from her life, such as her brief stint in Kerry’s bakery, with her passion for fine food, making her cookbooks a window into her world.

“I love writing about the outside stories behind the recipes. I write anecdotal recipes; I tell my life’s story through them,” Chase says. “It’s autobiographical.”

NEVER A BLAND GIRL

At each stage of her life, Chase acquired skills that she would later use to become a leader of the cooking profession. Her love of experimenting with recipes came first, followed by the development of her literary skills—necessary for success in her industry—at Harvard.

“I see myself as part of a generation that was able to marry intellect with food, to take it from just being a vocation to something that is highly respected,” Chase says.

Chase’s first brush with gourmet cooking came at age 13, when she served as cook at the Nantucket home of her aunt and uncle. For several months, she furnished the family with three meals a day. She also catered their weekly dinner parties using ingredients that had been grown locally.

“I got used to buying swordfish meat from the local fish market, and fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers came from the back of a truck that was parked on the cobblestone street. I would take the meat and vegetables home, then help my uncle grill them on an outdoor grill,” she says. “My duties quickly spilled over into the kitchen.”

Like in these early years, Nantucket has guided much of her culinary career. While Chase says she has never attended cooking school, she learned to cook by relying on local fruits, vegetables and meats that are staples on Nantucket. Chase’s Nantucket Open House Cookbook, published in 1987, introduces hundreds of recipes of her creation, including curried lentil soup with chutney butter, parmesan lasagna and braised lamb shanks with bourbon-barbeque sauce.

Chase, self-acknowledged as one of the “new breed of chefs during the mega-trend ’80s,” admits in the introduction to one chapter of the cookbook, “I find the recipes...magnificent.”

MIXING IT UP

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.”

“I didn’t want to be bound by doing the same thing day in and day out,” Chase says.

Instead of a generic career path, Chase moved back to Nantucket and opened her first restaurant, which she named “Que Sera Sarah.” The store name was ambiguous enough to reflect a variety of endeavors, Chase says. In this way, she reasoned, if the food venture failed, she could turn it into something else and retain the name.

“This was a question on my mind always in those days,” Chase says. “What ever will be me?”

Yet the venture was an instant success with Nantucket residents, as it provided a broad range array of Mediterranean dishes to an elite clientele. Chase says that the original menu included couscous salads, wrapped grape leaves and pizzas—“anything that appealed to my taste buds.”

Chase says that she modelled her store after European cuisine.

“I went on a bicycle trip from Paris to Vienna one year and fell in love with the European way of living,” she says.

Toby A. Greenberg has been a Nantucket summer resident for 40 years and says that Chase created a “happy environment” in her new store.

“The food was wonderful, always delicious and fresh,” Greenberg says. “Sarah was brilliant, she never took culinary classes but just learned by doing.”

Chase was only 27 when she started a venture that would earn her fame in the culinary world. At that age, she was invited to join a new cookbook project,

The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook. Within weeks Chase’s writing skills—honed at Harvard—brought her into the spotlight. Seeing that Chase was the best writer among the team of culinary experts, the project directors hired Chase to actually pen the cookbook. In a very short time, Chase went from small town business owner to minor celebrity.

“Driving down Fifth Avenue in a limousine, I got such a thrill from seeing my book in Saks and in the bookstore windows,” Chase says. “I realized how much I liked writing about food, and now I had an entree into the publishing world.”

BLENDING FAMILY AND CAREER

Chase continues to earn recognition as a top name in food circles. After selling Que Sera Sarah in 1989, she assembled a new career from a variety of her interests: travel, freelance writing, teaching and consulting. During this time, Chase says she met her husband, who was also in the food industry, at a Burgundy wine tasting dinner on Nantucket. They were married in 1995, and their son, Nigel— “the best thing we ever cooked up”— arrived in 1997.

Chase says she envisions herself more as a guardian of old American cultural traditions than as a revolutionary in the gourmet world of cooking.

“I see my work as part of a way of life that is fading from our modern lives,” she says.

Despite the reputation Chase has carved among professionals, she remains above all else a dedicated mother and wife. Chase says that she does not take shortcuts when cooking for her family, citing how she regularly cooks Nigel’s favorite meal, lollipop lambchops and potatoes—a recipe included in her book, Pedalling Through Provence Cookbook: A Taste of My Travels.

Chase says that raising a family has merited certain sacrifices to her career.

“My powers of concentration are not the same as before I had a child,” Chase says.

Jonathan D. Chase ’77—Chase’s brother and a self-taught chef of Deer Isle, Maine—disagrees. He says his sister’s “passion for wine, food and everything that goes with it has not diminished” since the birth of her son.

“The primary focus in her life right now is running a household and being a mother,” Jonathan Chase says. “That’s a full-time job.”

This Brother and sister culinary duo collaborated in 1992 to produce Saltwater Seasonings: Good Food from Coastal Maine, which included classic recipes such as Maine baked beans, fish chowder, strawberry shortcake and blueberry pie.

“We’re a very food-oriented family,” Jonathan Chase says. “Our grandmother was a good cook, our mother was a good cook, so we learned at an early age not to settle for less than really good food.”

Chase says that her son Nigel, who is now six years old, will accompany her to her 25th reunion. In preparation for the event, Chase has participated on the Food Committee for her class, negotiating with the event caterer until he agreed to reduce the price of the Class of 1979’s clambake from $90,000 to $50,000.

Still, Chase does not see being “business savvy” as her most important quality.

“I have integrity,” she says. “I have not gone bankrupt, but I have not made vast fortunes either. I believe in doing what you love, and the money will follow.”

—Staff writer Elena P. Sorokin can be reached at sorokin@fas.harvard.edu.