Lydia Child was helping her readers envisage a life of financial security, in which, with a little resourcefulness, the lard would not run out. When Wheaton teaches a seminar on how to read a cookbook, she always uses ‘‘The Frugal Housewife,’’ and people ‘‘almost always dislike it.’’ We do not recognize ourselves in Child’s remedies. For many of us, stressed by work, the impossible dream is not to eat preserves but to switch off the screen long enough to make them. We clip ever more recipes: our own personal database, talismans of a more leisurely existence. As Wheaton has found, the urge to read cookbooks is not always the same as the urge to cook.

Food books touch more of human life than what happens at the stove. The first cookbooks were sometimes called books of secrets, in which remedies for toothache or the plague jostled with recipes for roast meats, puddings and tarts. When I typed ‘‘easy’’ into the database, it offered me not just an easy crust for family pies but also an easy way to make ink and a method for trying to encourage an easy childbirth. (For the latter, E. Smith in 1727 recommended a concoction of raisins, figs, licorice and anise seeds boiled in spring water, imbibed morning and evening six weeks before the baby is due.)

Cookbook readers today would be disconcerted to be offered a cure for deafness or ‘‘fumes in the head’’ alongside instructions for puff pastry. Yet recipes are all still remedies in some form or other — everyday enchantments for making life better. Cookbooks show us at our most defenseless because they expose things we believe we lack: meringues that don’t fall; soup that will fill us up without making us fat; dinners that cook in no time at all. They allow us to imagine ourselves as bountiful hosts or artisanal pastry makers. It isn’t all fantasy, though. Cookbooks also speak to, and soothe, something real: the hunger that started when we were babies, when food and security were one and the same.

The nature of Wheaton’s database is that it can never be finished, at least not by one octogenarian working alone. Even if she were to go well beyond the 3,400 books by more than 6,000 authors that she has already cataloged, the project would comprise merely the edge of a vast hinterland that we can never access: the billions of unremarked bowls of stew, the bakers who toiled alone, the long-vanished food markets. Most cooks, especially female ones, have been illiterate, unable to record their kitchen experience. Wheaton has found just nine surviving Italian cookbooks by women from before 1900. It is as if all those nonnas rolling gnocchi and cutting tagliatelle never existed. The books she is collecting in her database are all that remain of the vast human conversation about food. All we can do is gather up the fragments and try to decipher what comforts they once held.

A few weeks ago, I got a new cookbook by Nigel Slater, ‘‘A Year of Good Eating.’’ I can’t pretend I needed it, though it does look lovely on the kitchen shelf in its calm blue cover. So far, I’ve cooked only one of the recipes, for hazelnut-maple cookies, though I have my eye on many more, if I can only find the time: a dish of wet polenta and winter greens, a piece of cod crusted with pumpkin seeds and dill. It makes me feel oddly reassured to have all this kitchen wisdom stored up, like jars of jelly in a pantry. Recipes can feel like charms against life’s disappointments or protection against the onward march of the years. You never know exactly when they will be called for.