[jasode]

>A: It does not contain the texts of books or recipes. Seems to be a bit useless without it.

Yes, it's "useless" if one wants the The Sifter to be a source of recipes. Instead, the Sifter's goal appears to be a database of meta information[1] (e.g. ingredients, techniques, etc) of recipes and not the full text of recipes themselves.

An analogy might be a website of baseball statistics[2]. Yes, one can also complain that site is "useless" because it doesn't include videos of the actual games. But others can use it to see when black players first appeared, trends of batting averages, trends of pitcher rotations, etc. A researcher wouldn't need the actual films of gameplay to answer those types of questions and a database of meta info about baseball actually enables faster lookup.

[1] excerpt: >The Sifter isn’t a collection of recipes, or a repository of entire texts. Instead, it’s a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant,

[2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/

[fermienrico]

Hmm... how many people go oh let me check what the stats are for black pepper in 18th century?

Baseball metrics have value on its own to a vast number of people. Cookbook metadata has little value to most people beyond the academic researchers.

This is a poor analogy, no offense.

[greenie_beans]

With that attitude, you’re missing out on the cultural and historical significance of food and ingredients.

Food tells so many stories. Pepper usage could tell you things if you’re combining it with other data. There’s a lot there, with such a simple data point — class, race, ethnicity, technology, famine, publishing trends, economic output, agricultural history, climate, trends in taste — so much!

Food history is not just for academic researchers.

[codyb]

I was just thinking the other day that’d it’d be interesting to be able to see what ingredients are used with eachother most often.

Say for instance, you bought ground cumin for some recipe, and now you have a bunch left and dunno what to add it to.

You could try randomly adding it or a database like this might give you some pretty interesting results.

[gavindean90]

Food has a value on its own to a vast number of people. I would argue there are far more cooks than baseball fans.

[fermienrico]

This isn’t about Food. It’s about a question such as “During which decade black pepper was the most popular?”

Perhaps you can find more use cases for it? I can’t think of

[wrs]

This is a funny argument because I can certainly imagine myself giving baseball statistics as a prime example of huge effort going into collecting “useless” data! (Unless you manage a baseball team.) I don’t see how your question is less interesting than “who had the 43rd highest batting average in 1934?”, which I’m sure there are multiple places to look up.

[mitchdoogle]

A database of baseball stats includes game results, so you can tell which teams won, how they did in each particular inning, or against a particular pitcher on a particular day.

Not including recipes themselves is like showing all the individual stats for every player without giving any information about who won the games. There's value there, but it would be much more valuable if the full information was available - not just to the general public, but to researchers as well.