The Sifter is a searchable, crowd-sourced database of over 5,000 cookbooks and cookbook authors.
The Sifter is a publicly available searchable database and is designed to be a tool to aid in finding, identifying and comparing historical and contemporary writing on food and related topics. It is overseen by an advisory board of rotating members of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery as well as other friends of food history. As with Wikipedia, it will be populated by its users. Entries will be made both in standard English and the language of the original document. It will be possible to enter data in over 150 writing systems. As many countries as possible will be included. Corrections may be made by registered users. Data visualization will be a component. With the aid of this tool it is our hope that what has been invisible will come into focus.