Holmberg.

It all started with a post-collegiate waitressing gig in Colorado.

"I really didn’t know what I was doing after college," said Holmberg (French ‘78), who moved to Denver a year after graduation because some college pals lived there. She got a job waiting tables and eventually moved up to pantry cook, a $5-an-hour job where she learned she had a knack for crafting recipes-good recipes. Like her trademark crème franglaise, homemade custard blended with crème fraîche. Fancy stuff.

She’s now the editor and publisher of Fine Cooking, the third-best-selling cooking magazine in the nation.

"It never occurred to me that food could be a career," she said.

Her typical workday involves lots of meetings, lots of planning and then sampling recipes made in the magazine’s test kitchen. It sounds like fun to try four different kinds of caramel sauces, but if you have to do it on the same day that you’re trying three fish dishes and a banana split, she said, it can get a bit icky.

She’s not complaining, though. This Hoo loves her job. And it actually ties into her major. French language, fine dining-it all connects.

After three and a half years at the restaurant in Denver, she decided to go to Paris to study cooking at the well-known La Varenne School, which is now located in Burgundy. The exclusive one-year course came with a hefty price tag, though: $25,000. A lot of money for a relatively recent grad. So Holmberg moved back home to the D.C. area first so she could live rent-free while she interned for Anne Willan, who runs La Varenne. The agreement was to work unpaid for Willan for a year and then attend La Varenne at no charge.

After completing the one-year course, she became a private chef for an Austrian diplomat in Paris and eventually made her way back to the States to work for the Greenbrier, the West Virginia resort.

A year and a half later, she again found herself on the other side of the Atlantic, this time in London, where she worked for a cookbook publisher. In 1993, she landed in Connecticut to write for Fine Cooking; she became editor a year later.

Fine Cooking, Holmberg explained, finds top-notch chefs whose recipes can be duplicated at home. The dishes don’t exactly involve mac and cheese, but the idea is for the recipes to be accessible.

"We just put a lot of figuring out into how to write the recipes," she said. "Our recipes really work and the food tastes great."

With all this recipe testing, Holmberg admits that she throws a mean dinner party. "I personally am a fabulous cook, if I do say so myself," she joked.

On the menu: Anything except green peppers. "I just hate ’em," she said.

Nicola M. White is a writer in New York.

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