Cathy Whims Is Releasing a Cookbook

Cathy Whims set the groundwork for much of Portland’s Italian food scene. In the 1990s, she wowed the city at the iconic Genoa, a dark and moody establishment with highbrow tasting menus and fine wines. A decade later, she left to open Nostrana, setting up the city’s de facto ristorante for silky pastas and cut-your-own (with scissors!) pizza pies. Seven James Beard nominations and three decades on, Whims stands as the city’s fairy godmother of Italian cuisine, overseeing Nostrana as it hits the 20-year mark and two outposts of its sibling pizzeria and cocktail bar Oven and Shaker, the OG in the Pearl and another that recently opened at PDX.  

Whims has written recipes for outlets like Epicurious and The Wall Street Journal, but she has yet to release a cookbook. Now, the chef and restaurateur is adding “author” to her list of titles, publishing The Italian Summer Kitchen: Timeless Recipes for La Dolce Vita on April 15 (Whims will chat with food writer Jim Dixon at a Powell’s for a release party on April 19).

The cookbook reflects Whims’s decades learning, unlearning, and relearning Italian cooking. Instead of photography, watercolor illustrations by Kate Lewis match the simplicity of each recipe and lend the book a charmingly vintage aesthetic. It would be in good company shelved alongside the Chez Panisse Café Cookbook and Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. This is not a tome that demands expensive grocery trips, hours of prep, or even much in the way of cleanup. “It’s not too big,” Whims says. “You can throw it in a tote bag, maybe with one of your favorite sauté pans and a couple of knives and go to a rental house or Airbnb at the coast, or in the mountains, or wherever and easily make these dishes.”

Alex Frane: When did you decide to write this cookbook?

Cathy Whims: Originally it was a different project, and in my head it was more of a restaurant cookbook; it was a Nostrana cookbook. I worked on that with a great writer, Martha Holmberg, and we were shopping it right when COVID hit, or right before, and no one was really biting at it. So, I talked with my agents, and I realized I’d like it to be a smaller cookbook that has recipes that people really want to cook at home, and that is true to Italian cuisine—very simple [recipes] that people make all the time.

Most people, when they think of Italy, often think of summer. Italians take their summer vacation, Ferragosto, every August for at least two weeks, if not the whole month, and there’s just so many evocative memories around that and the food that people prepare when they go to the beach or the mountains. You want everything to be carefree and fun, but very flavorful. To me, that’s the essence of Italian cuisine. So, it evolved around that theme of cooking in summer, and recipes that aren’t so complicated that [they] distract you from doing all the things you love to do in summer, like swimming, hiking, and relaxing outside with rosé. I wanted to capture that feeling and evoke that in the book.

AF: Did you start from the ground up when you realized you weren’t going to be writing the Nostrana cookbook?

CW: I would say there was maybe a quarter left over from the previous draft; there were things that I make all the time.

AF: I noticed the signature Nostrana radicchio salad made it in.

CW: That kind of had to go in there. But a lot of it just evolved naturally. I fell in love with zucchini writing this book, and I never used to think that much about zucchini. But when I was going to the farmers market in early summer, some of the farmers had really early zucchini, and it was small, and it was very sweet and firm, and all of a sudden, I just wanted to make more and more zucchini recipes. I think there might be seven zucchini recipes in the book.

AF: What was the inspiration for going with an illustrated book?

CW: There’s something evocative about illustrations. I thought about Elizabeth David’s many cookbooks on provincial French cooking, Italian cooking, [with] beautiful little line drawings. And one cookbook that was super influential for me, probably in my 30s, called Taste of Tuscany. Leslie Forbes was the author. And she not only wrote her book, she did her own illustrations. She also wrote the Taste of Provence, which is a lovely book. And I just pull those books down all the time. I’m using them all the time because it makes me feel happy, like I’m just going to pretend I’m in Tuscany or Provence while I’m doing this. I think that that’s what Kate Lewis’s illustrations provide, and we had a great time taking photographs and sending them to her. We haven’t even met in person.

AF: Nostrana opened 20 years ago, and you’re over 30 years into your career as a restaurateur. Was something holding you back from writing a book until now?

CW: I think maybe I just had time to really focus on what I wanted the book to be. And my husband and I have been traveling to Italy, usually twice a year, and we’ve been going back to many of the same places, even though we travel around a lot and do new things. I think doing that helped me internalize what Italy and Italian food really was to me. Being able to slow down and not chase after Michelin [starred restaurants] or guidebooks or Instagram posts, I got to discover what I really care about.

AF: Do any recipes best represent the book?

CW: One is a dish that I just came up with one night and it went into the book, and it’s so simple. It’s spaghettini with prawns. I think it only has five ingredients. There’s garlic, extra virgin olive oil, the prawns, spaghettini, and chopped parsley. It’s something you can throw together even when you’re tired, and together it’s something so pure. Then the other recipe that jumps to mind is also pasta, and that’s spaghettini with clams and with the optional garnish of bottarga, which is dried mullet roe. Maybe it’s because we often vacation in coastal areas in the summer, but these fresh, briny, fishy flavors sort of scream summer to me.

AF: How personal does the book feel to you? Do all these recipes collected say something about your life?

CW: When I ended up having the opportunity to buy Genoa (and I was an owner there for 13 years), I became in charge of the wine list. So, I was meeting lots of Italian winemakers that were in the US to promote their wine. A lot of wineries had apartments, and they’d say, “Come visit the winery. We can put you up!” And usually, they were very attractive Italian men. Now, fortunately, there’s more women involved, but back then that all sounded great. But I got there and realized, Wow, I don’t really understand Italian food. I fell so in love with the purity and the simplicity of the dishes I was eating. I told myself, I need to relearn! Like, we thought at Genoa that we were all making Italian food.

We adored Marcella Hazan’s books and cooked from them all the time. But there were a lot of other things going on. One, we were a super special occasion restaurant, and so customers expected things like rack of lamb and the rack of lamb might even come with a Béarnaise sauce, like how Italian is that? So, I went through a really long period of relearning it. And so, I would say that this book is kind a memoir of my unlearning and relearning how to make food taste Italian here in the United States.