Always a Logger: Cynthia Nims ’86

Cookbook author Cynthia Nims’ romance with food had as good a beginning as any: a ham sandwich.

Nims ’86 had just arrived in Paris for a study abroad program when she tasted a classic French baguette sandwich with ham, butter, and Dijon mustard. The simplicity was “mind blowing,” she says. “It was different from any sandwich I’d ever had.”

At Puget Sound, Nims majored in math and French. She had always enjoyed cooking growing up, but it wasn’t until her trip to France, where she sampled the local cuisine and witnessed a demonstration at a cooking school, that she identified it as a possible calling. Her college years featured plenty of other culinary exploits, from assembling a makeshift chicken cordon bleu in her dorm with mint-flavored toothpicks from The Diner, to whipping up a tofu stir-fry for the Flying Karamazov Brothers (they were performing on campus, and she was a member of the Cultural Events Committee).