Resources
About this site
Tagliatelle.org is a static, English-language reference to a single Italian pasta and the kitchen practice around it. It is not a recipe blog, not a cookbook, and not a content farm. It is a small encyclopedia of one dish, organised as 38 pages, accessible without registration, advertising, JavaScript, or tracking of any kind.
Editorial mission
The site exists because tagliatelle is one of the most-misunderstood Italian dishes in the English-speaking world. The pasta is confused with fettuccine and linguine; the canonical sauce, ragù bolognese, is confused with 'spaghetti bolognese' (a dish that does not exist in Italy); and the cultural context — the city of Bologna, the trade of the sfoglina, the 1972 deposit of the dish's specification at the Chamber of Commerce — is almost never explained. This site is an attempt to repair that.
The editorial register is intended to sit somewhere between Slow Food Editore and a small academic gastronomic reference: factual, sourced, restrained. No marketing, no exclamation marks, no personal anecdotes, no rhetorical questions. The model, in tone, is closer to Pellegrino Artusi than to a 21st-century recipe site. Italian terms are italicised on first use with a brief English gloss where one is needed; British English spelling is used throughout; dates are given in the day-month-year European format; metric measurements are primary.
Sourcing standards
Facts are attributed where they exist. Specific dates, names, ratios, and citations are given only when securely known; where they are not, the text gives a range or omits. Folklore — the Borgia / Zafirano origin story, the Pius XII papalina attribution — is marked explicitly as folklore on each page where it appears, distinguished from the documented record. The sources page lists the principal references; particular pages cite particular works in line.
Where the site quotes a price or a number that may have shifted with time (the wholesale price of Alba white truffle, the cost of a kilogram of Italian flour), a range is given rather than a single figure, with an indication of the year of reference. Corrections of specific factual claims, with a citation, are welcome.
What the site is not
- Not a cookbook. Recipes appear in the technique and sauce pages, with quantities, but the site is not organised as a sequence of dinner plans. Read it like an encyclopedia: each page is self-contained and links to related pages.
- Not a food blog. No personal anecdotes, no first-person voice (outside this 'about' page), no images of the author's lunch, no comment section.
- Not a content farm. Each page is hand-written. There is no AI-generated padding, no SEO repetition, no synthetic introductions, and no thin pages added to satisfy keyword density.
- Not commercial. No advertising. No affiliate links. No tracking pixels. No paywalls. No newsletter sign-ups. The site is offered as a public reference.
- Not modern. The site is plain HTML and CSS. There is no JavaScript. There is no client-side framework. The pages will load on a 2010 mobile phone or a text browser, and they will outlast the JavaScript ecosystems that have come and gone over the last decade.
Structure
The site has 38 content pages organised into six sections:
- The pasta — the basic definition, history, the 1972 standard, the broader egg-pasta tradition, the spinach variant.
- Comparisons — tagliatelle next to fettuccine, pappardelle, linguine, tagliolini and tajarin.
- Making — technique pages covering the dough, flour, ratio, hand-rolling, machine, cutting, drying, and cooking.
- Sauces — ten classical sauces, with ragù bolognese as the keystone.
- Regions — Bologna, Piedmont, and the tagliolini tradition.
- Reference — pasta tools, wine pairings, cheese pairings, cooking times, common mistakes.
Plus three resource pages: a glossary, a sources page, and this one.
Technical notes
The site is built as static HTML files served from a single domain. There is no database, no content management system, and no build pipeline beyond a small set of helper scripts that emit the shared CSS chrome consistently across pages. The CSS is inlined in each page for resilience: the pages will render correctly without any external resources. There are no web fonts — the typography uses the system serif (Iowan Old Style, Palatino, Book Antiqua, Georgia in fallback) and the system sans-serif for short utility text. Italian terms are styled with em (italic) on first use; the long-form serif body type does the rest of the work.
The pages are designed to print well: a print stylesheet hides the navigation, footer, and key-facts sidebar; the body type sits at a readable size on A4 paper. Anyone wishing to print a page for the kitchen can do so.
Accessibility
Headings are properly nested (one h1 per page; h2 for sections; h3 for subsections in long technique pages). The colour palette is high-contrast (dark brown text on a warm cream background). Focus states are visible. The site is navigable by keyboard. Screen readers should encounter clean semantic markup throughout. If you find an accessibility issue, please report it.
Corrections
The site is a reference, and references should be corrected when they are wrong. Specific factual corrections — a misquoted Accademia text, a wrong production date, a missing DOP zone, a confusion between two appellations — are welcomed at the contact address below. Subjective disagreements about technique (the precise length of rest, the precise amount of olive oil in the soffritto, whether nutmeg belongs in ragù) are interesting but less actionable; the site presents one defensible reading of each disputed question, generally the Accademia or Bolognese reading, and notes where Italian regional or domestic practice diverges.
Contact
For corrections, sourcing queries, or substantive comments: [publisher contact address to be filled in]. The site does not collect email addresses, does not maintain a mailing list, and does not send any communication beyond direct replies to direct correspondence.
Why a domain dedicated to one dish
Because the dish deserves it. Tagliatelle has a city, a tradition, a written specification, a sauce, a wine, a cheese, a season, a trade. Each of these is documented across the site. None of it has been assembled in English, in one place, with sources, before. Cookery sites that cover all of Italian food in passing tend to collapse tagliatelle into 'a long flat pasta' and move on. The dish is more interesting than that. So is the city that gave it to the world.