Tradition/Traditions: From Cookbooks to Gastronomic Identity – with Mila Fumini, Luca Cesari, Michele Fino (discussant)

RAGU – Research and Archives of Gastronomic Uses is a project to collect and digitize handwritten sources relating to cooking in the postwar period: recipes written out by mothers, grandmothers and aunts, scribbled in pencil or meticulously penned in ink, collected in old notebooks or diaries overflowing with clippings, adorned with coffee stains and pastel drawings. The project hopes to save these recipes from oblivion and use digital heritage strategies to collect them in a portal where they can be browsed and searched by type, area of origin and ingredients. Memory is not made up only of information, but also gestures, rituals and expressions of affection. All of these are also key elements in cooking and food.
Mila Fumini (the creator of RAGU and a scholar of archives of the modern age with a PhD in history) and Luca Cesari (a food writer and author of the book Storia della pasta in dieci piatti) will present the project, addressing the theme of tradition through the case of cookbooks and the thorny issue of gastronomic identity.