Reina Gattuso reports on the launch of The Sifter, a Wikipedia-style database compiling over 5,000 historical cookbooks from Europe and the U.S. spanning more than a thousand years. The project, the culmination of 50 years of work by culinary historian Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, allows users to search not just for titles but for specific ingredients, techniques, and authors, providing a powerful tool for analyzing long-term trends in dining habits, trade routes, and culinary culture. It represents a shift from viewing cookbooks merely as recipe collections to treating them as serious historical documents that reveal the “gendered economic and cultural capital” of their times.