Cold-Weather Cooking

Gray Nantucket winter days often need a little brightening, and Chase ( Nantucket Open House Cookbook ) does her best to dispel the windy gloom with such snazzy solace as curried lentil soup with chutney butter, pumpkin prosciutto with Parmesan lasagne, and braised lamb shanks with bourbon-barbecue sauce. This is intensely flavored, ``happy'' food culled eclectically from the author's catering experiences, her Polish roots and ongoing European travels. Not one for subtlety in either food or prose, Chase--self-acknowledged as one of the ``new breed of chefs during the megatrend eighties, Ivy-educated and food-fad fed''--admits in her introduction to one chapter, ``I find the recipes . . . magnificent.'' Actually, she's not far from the truth. Occasionally combinations may be a little madcap, as in seared squid with tamari beurre blanc or whole roasted foie gras with orange and ginger, but more frequently Chase's style and enthusiasm are contagious, and the impulse is to run to the kitchen to recreate salmon and wild rice fish cakes or warm tomato pie or walnut-rum-raisin applesauce cake. The variety of chapter choices, too, is frisky, beginning with ``So Long Summer,'' with stops at ``December Dazzle'' and ``Stormy Weather and Magic Mountains,'' and reaching an appropriate close with ``The Tease of Spring.'' Illustrations not seen by PW. (Nov.)