From project's FAQ (https://thesifter.org/Home/Faq):
Q: What is not in the Sifter?
A: It does not contain the texts of books or recipes.
Seems to be a bit useless without it.
Q: What is not in the Sifter?
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,
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.
Perhaps you can find more use cases for it? I can’t think of
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.
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.
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.
...In the same way a dictionary is useless if you want a novel.
Cookbook metadata DB provides value to a vanishingly small % of the people - primarily academic researchers.
I am not saying that this whole enterprise is useless, I am saying that your analogy doesn't hold up.