Ragù is a project that aims to collect, catalog and make available to everyone a precious but little-explored heritage of the Italian culinary tradition: family cookbooks. These texts, written and handed down basically by women, risk being forgotten and remain in the shadows, due to their semi-cultured nature. To date, many recipe books have already been collected. They come from varied geographical areas and date back to different eras. This precious knowledge has flowed into this digital archive that aspires to preserve it and facilitate its dissemination.

Handwritten domestic cookbooks are precious documents, capable of illustrating cultures, relationships and traditions. The digital archive of culinary knowledge is the place where decades of Italian tradition, made up of recipes and anecdotes from the past come together. The objectives that the digital archive has set itself are therefore to collect, preserve and make easily consultable the Italian cookbooks that are gathered in the context of the Ragù project. The archive promotes dynamic consultation, i.e. with a high level of user interaction, so as to stimulate ever wider and more active dissemination.

The digital archive is made up of three macro-sections, each of which has its own specificities.

Homepage - storytelling and data visualization

The homepage of the site takes advantage of digital storytelling, a technique that is particularly suited to the themes of the project. The contents are therefore organized within a structure that exploits a narrative element, specifically the red thread of history and tradition. Another fundamental component that fits into the narrative is that of data visualization. The story, the project, are therefore also told through the data collected in the context of the project. Significant relationships and patterns were explored and then placed in the context of the storytelling.

You can explore the map, to identify which and how many recipes come from a particular city. You can also find out how many times a ingredient measurement term is used in recipes (you will find that very often women measured by eye, from experience). You can investigate the most common ingredient categories and finally which food categories are combined most in the recipes found so far.

Explore the recipes - Filter and browse

The core section of the site is the exploratory section. The user has the possibility to explore the recipes collected and cataloged in the context of the project. The recipes can be filtered through categories (type of meal, ingredients, city of origin). Each recipe, if clicked, allows access to the related digitized photo and information.

Explore the "Pasticcio di maccheroni" recipe to discover the differences between how Mrs Dina makes it and how Mrs Anna Maria makes it. Discover also the variants of the names that these women used to call the ingredients. You can discover complex recipes, such as "Tortellini" (there are at least 5 recipes to prepare them!) or navigate into poorer recipes, perhaps dating back to war times. You can investigate which ingredients could be replaced with which other ingredients and which ingredients are not replaceable.

Browse the cookbooks [coming soon]

In this section it is possible to access the digitized cookbooks and browse them in their entirety. This section is currently under construction.

If you want to discover more about the technical aspects behind the Ragu project, you can check the github repository.