Happy Thursday! In case you missed it, all the cookie recipes in the Salt + Spine archive are free for the rest of the year. Happy holiday baking!
We’ve got a fun conversation for you today, recorded here in Bologna where I’ve been living for the past 15 months. It’s our last episode of the fall season. A huge thank you for listening this year—a quieter year for us, as I was in an intensive MBA program, but still a fun year of conversations with folks like Sohla El-Waylly, Viola Buitoni, Tyler Florence, Makenna Held, Matt Rodbard and Deuki Hong, Peter Som, and more. We’re gearing up for an exciting 2026—stay tuned!
🎙️ The Interview: Cathy Whims
“I couldn’t believe how pure and simple [Italian cuisine] was, how ingredient-based it was, and how produce-centric. I just fell hard in love with this fresh, straightforward cuisine.”
I sat down recently with Portland chef Cathy Whims at Sette Tavoli in Bologna, Italy—one of my favorite restaurants here—to talk about her first cookbook, The Italian Summer Kitchen. After more than four decades in professional kitchens, including the last twenty years as chef-owner of Portland’s beloved Nostrana, Cathy has distilled everything she’s learned about Italian cooking into this beautiful, illustrated guide to simple, seasonal home cooking.
The book isn’t the one she originally planned to write. Like so many things, the pandemic changed her course. What started as a restaurant cookbook with photographs became something more intimate and personal: a collection of recipes Cathy found herself cooking over and over during lockdown, dishes that brought comfort and joy, illustrated with watercolor paintings by Kate Lewis that capture the dreamy feeling of an Italian summer.
📗 The Cookbook
📗 The Italian Summer Kitchen: Timeless Recipes for La Dolce Vita by Cathy Whims
We 💚 local bookstores. Pick up your copy here: Bookshop | Omnivore (signed!)
🎁 Giveaway: Win a Copy of The Italian Summer Kitchen!
We’re giving away one copy of Cathy’s cookbook to a Salt + Spine reader! Two ways to enter:
Paid subscribers are automatically entered (no action needed—thank you for supporting Salt + Spine!)
Or, you can leave a comment below sharing a summer dish you’re missing in the coolness of winter
Giveaway is open to U.S. residents and closes on Dec. 19.
The Journey to Simple
Cathy’s path to Italian cooking began in her mother’s kitchen in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her mother taught herself to cook by watching Julia Child and cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking—and insisted on serving a hot breakfast every morning, even while working full-time. When teenage Cathy announced she was becoming a vegetarian, her mother’s response was brilliant: “If you’re home for dinner, you’ll make a vegetarian dish to share with the family. I’ll make a dish, and you can choose to eat it or not.” She handed Cathy three vegetarian cookbooks, including The Vegetarian Epicure, and a lifelong love of cooking was born.
That love eventually led Cathy to Portland, where she landed what she calls her “dream job” at Genoa, then the city’s premier special-occasion restaurant. She worked her way through every station—pasta, fish, entrées, pastry—eventually becoming menu chef and part-owner. It was the kind of sophisticated, seven-course fine dining that people saved up for, that they associated with birthdays and anniversaries.
But then something shifted. Cathy started traveling to Italy, visiting wineries, eating in trattorias, discovering the pure, straightforward cooking that defines Italian cuisine at its best. “I couldn’t believe how pure and simple it was,” she tells me, “and how ingredient-based it was and how produce-centric.” She fell hard for food that let each ingredient shine, that didn’t rely on complex French sauces or elaborate preparations.
Initially, she wanted to bring that approach back to Genoa, but the restaurant’s customers had other ideas. One particularly stinging review called out “the hundred-dollar chicken”—because who comes to a special-occasion restaurant to eat simple roast chicken, no matter how beautifully it’s prepared with fresh figs? (Never mind that people were happily paying a premium for Judy Rodgers’ famous roast chicken at Zuni Café in San Francisco!)
Nostrana: A New Beginning
Twenty years ago, Cathy opened Nostrana with a clear vision: a neighborhood restaurant serving the kind of food she’d fallen in love with in Italy, sourced from the incredible bounty of the Pacific Northwest. The similarities between the two regions—abundant growing seasons, Mediterranean-like climates, access to great seafood—made it a natural fit.
Cathy emphasizes simplicity, quality ingredients, and letting each element speak for itself. At Nostrana, that means wood-fired pizza, handmade pasta, simple grilled meats, and dishes like tagliata, sliced flat-iron steak served on a bed of arugula with a garlic and olive oil sauce.
And then there’s the Insalata Nostrana.
The Cult of the Salad
If you’ve been to Nostrana, you’ve probably ordered it. The restaurant’s signature salad has developed something of a cult following, and for good reason.
It starts with radicchio—that beautiful, bitter chicory that Cathy calls “one of the most beautiful vegetables that exist.” But radicchio can be intensely bitter, which is why many people say they don’t like it. Cathy’s secret? Soak it in ice water for at least an hour (sometimes more, depending on the season). “The soaking in ice water somehow has the effect that a frost on a crop has,” she explains. “It makes it taste sweeter.” The result is radicchio that’s crunchy, juicy, and far more approachable.
The other key is the strong, assertive dressing: anchovies, garlic, mayonnaise, egg, all emulsified into something creamy and bold. Add croutons made from house-made focaccia sautéed in butter and olive oil with fresh sage and rosemary, plus generous shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano, and you have a salad that people dream about.
“People love to tell me they never liked radicchio and now they’re addicted to the salad,” Cathy says.
Training with the Masters
Cathy’s journey has been shaped by time spent with some of Italian cooking’s most iconic figures. She studied with Marcella Hazan, whose famous tomato butter sauce has been on Nostrana’s menu since day one (“you can’t believe how much we sell of that,” Cathy laughs). She also trained with Dario Cecchini, the legendary Tuscan butcher, whose olive oil cake recipe appears in her new book.
And she continues to learn. Every year when she visits Bologna, she takes a hand-rolling pasta class, getting better each time at the art of rolling paper-thin sfoglia. It’s a humbling practice, one that reminds her there’s always more to master. “The dough is always putting me in my place,” she says. “It’s like, I’m in charge. You’re not there yet.”
The Book That Almost Wasn’t
The Italian Summer Kitchen exists because of the pandemic.
When COVID-19 shut down restaurants in Portland for months, Cathy found herself with time to cook at home. Her original proposal for a restaurant cookbook wasn’t finding traction, partly because cheffy books suddenly weren’t what publishers wanted. But cooking at home during shelter-in-place, Cathy noticed something: she was happily making the same dishes over and over. These were the recipes that brought comfort and that felt worth repeating. They represented everything she’d learned about Italian cooking distilled to its essence.
Her agent suggested pivoting to a home-cooking book. And instead of photographs—which she feels can be intimidating and make everything look impossibly perfect—Cathy decided on watercolor illustrations. The result, with artwork by Kate Lewis, feels like flipping through a sketchbook from a summer spent in Italy. It’s inviting and evocative.
“I feel like the illustrations just bring people feeling like they’re traveling,” Cathy says. “My feet are in the sand at the seashore, or I’m in the mountains hiking and coming back hungry for some nice, soothing dish.”
Summer, Preserved
The book includes recipes for preserving summer’s bounty, as Cathy believes harnessing those flavors can make you happy all year round. One recipe Cathy highlights is a cantaloupe confittura (a preserve or compote) that she remembers making decades ago from an issue of Gambero Rosso. It’s made with fresh cantaloupe, citrus, and sugar, and she tells me it’s perfect alongside a tagliere of salumi and cheese, stirred into morning yogurt, or spread on toast.
Preservation shows up in other ways, too, in approaches that let you capture the essence of summer and carry it forward.
Playing with Ingredients
At the end of our conversation, we put Cathy to the test in our culinary game. I gave her Pacific Northwest ingredients (Oregon spot prawns, wild chanterelles, hazelnuts), Italian staples (bottarga, guanciale, red wine vinegar), summer produce (zucchini blossoms, peaches, ricotta), and some secret ingredients (white truffle butter, marshmallows, kimchi). Listen in to see what she makes!
🍳 The Recipes
This week, paid Substack subscribers will receive these two featured recipes from The Italian Summer Kitchen—subscribe today to get cooking!
