Here is a small fragment from just one of Wheaton’s lists of search terms, which so far cover more than 130,000 results, encompassing ingredients, techniques, food for the sick and much more:

Black beans

Black cumin

Black gram

Black grouse

Black pepper

Blackberries

Blackbirds

Black-eyed peas

Blackstrap molasses

And another:

Ladyfingers

Lamb

Lamb’s lettuce

Lamb’s-quarter

Langsat

Lard

Lasagna

Latkes

From ladyfingers to latkes is a prose poem suggestive of whole worlds. The list runs on and on, from aal (German for eel) to zucchini, seeming to contain the promise of a universal cookbook of European and American cuisine, pieced together from all the recipes ever written — a Borgesian feat of quixotic and fantastical taxonomy.

The germ for the database first came to Wheaton in 1962. Her husband, Bob, was studying for his Ph.D. at Harvard, and her two children (the third had not yet been born) were in preschool five days a week for three hours (‘‘assuming no bugs, earaches or other interruptions’’). Wheaton had done graduate studies in art history, but she discovered that what she really wanted to do was read old cookbooks.

One day, she found herself trying to get her head around an excess of confusingly similar yet distinct medieval blancmange recipes in four languages. Blancmange — which means ‘‘white food’’ — referred to a family of recipes in which pale mixtures were casseroled together into a pap, often with rice and almond milk. There were blancmanges of lobster and capon; of pike, carp and haddock. Wheaton sketched out a table representing different blancmange recipes on a piece of three-ring notebook paper and found that she could make sense of them only ‘‘as long as I kept staring at the paper.’’ She moved on to French cookbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries and tried to organize the data they contained by taking notes on each recipe one by one. But when she returned to these notes, she was frustrated. She couldn’t grasp the character of the books.

In the 1970s Wheaton discovered McBee cards. They were a primitive data system, in which different pieces of information could be encoded by punching holes to designate broad categories (date, gender, country). ‘‘After the cards are properly punched, whole packs of them can be searched by running a knitting needle through the desired hole in the pack and lifting it up,’’ Wheaton explained in a talk last summer at a food symposium held at Oxford. ‘‘When, if one is lucky, gems of information will drop out.’’ McBee cards had obvious limitations, however. ‘‘My categories kept expanding, and the cards did not.’’ Wheaton tried to improve the cards by adding color-coded edges, but then she ran out of colors.

In 1982, Wheaton set aside her knitting needles and switched to computers, buying the first IBM PC, which could produce accented letters. (‘‘Apple scorned such frippery,’’ Wheaton said. ‘‘I believe they thought accented letters were like ice cream cones with sprinkles.’’) After using and abandoning two database programs, she settled on Microsoft Access and has been using it ever since. ‘‘It is possible to search for fungi or for morels, and to search for courgettes and also get zucchini,’’ she said. It’s Wheaton’s hope that someday a friendly library or other research institution will take on the database and make it open for everyone to search.