Who owns a recipe?

In my redesign of Food. according to me, I am adding some pretty neato widgets and hoosits to the site that were quite impossible in my beloved Blogger. One feature that I am particularly enthused about is the Eat In section, wherein I shall post recipes, hawk my favorite machines and gadgets, and rant about whatever weird fruit I discovered on my most recent excursion to Uwajimaya. I have always published recipes here, but making individual GoogleDocs and linking them over feels much more deliberate. Scanning some of my older posts, I have noticed a handful of “this is from X’s cookbook” recipes. Though I always make sure to appropriately attribute the source of the recipe, I have begun to wonder, do I have any right to post, for example, David Lebovitz’s biscotti recipe? I don’t think I would post a whole chapter from On Food and Cooking. I know I would not. Is a recipe any different from a entry about the rise of the sugar industry?

Maybe the answer depends on what a recipe is. Is it a static thing? Printed on the glossy page of a published cookbook, it is fixed. Copied out onto a 3×5 card for my kitchen drawer, it becomes flexible. If I make changes to the amount of sugar in the waffle recipe that came with my waffle baker, does the recipe become mine? What if I just add dried cherries? How different does the finished product need to be to change its identity?

Websites like allrecipes.com and epicurious.com publish recipes for download. On Epicurious, many are republished from past editions of Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines. Most of the dishes on AllRecipes are contributions from home cooks. Rarely does anyone write, this came out of X magazine or Y cookbook. But we can assume that much of what is published online isn’t original material, if there is even such a thing in cooking. And that’s the thing: the cookie has already been invented. All we can do is improvise.

We know, of course, that a cake is more than flour, sugar, and eggs. A good recipe will not only indicate how much of what you need, but explains in very precise terms how to put those ingredients together and achieve the desired result. Using a good recipe, twenty people should be able to make twenty identical cakes. Perhaps the difference isn’t in the amount of sugar, or the decision to use pastry flour instead of all-purpose flour. Perhaps the property part of a recipe is the procedure.

But you can’t have one without the other, can you? In my own file, most recipes don’t include procedure at all. That part of the formula (many bakers use this term in favor of “recipe”) is in my head, my hands. I often have a wreck of a time sharing recipes with friends. The “procedure” portion of my instructions is rarely more complicated than Mix wet. Mix dry. Combine all. 325º. Sometimes my notes are no more explicit than an oven temperature and indicators for doneness. Of course, it isn’t at all fair to assume that anyone who might read my recipes already knows what “ribbon stage” looks like, or that of course egg whites in a chiffon cake are whipped before adding them to the batter.

Plagiarism in academics is easy to identify and there is a clear legal and moral burden to indicate that these words and ideas are not mine. Is it enough that I do not attempt to pass the biscotti recipe off as my own? The question disappears if I write instead, There’s this wonderful book called Room For Dessert. It’s gorgeous and has great recipes in it. I just made the Chocolate Almond Biscotti and they are blowing my mind. You should check it out! But the point of my post is lost. The anecdote, or suggestions for variations or shortcuts, lose part of their force if the recipe is missing. What I want here, is you in my kitchen. I want you to bake a batch and think of me. And, of course, Mr. Lebovitz.

The concern is not wholly selfless either. A handful of the regulars who hang out on these pages have admitted – to my delight – to printing off some of my recipes for future experimentation. While I am ticked by the idea that someone I have never met is slaving away in his or her own kitchen, wondering how I made such stunning molasses cookies, a part of me is a little sad about releasing my formulae out into the ether. What if someone ruins them and blames me? What if Rachel Ray secretly reads my blog and is stockpiling my recipes for her next cookbook, for which she will take all the credit? I have a handful of treasured recipes that I haven’t published here because I am afraid of what might happen to them out there in the big world.

There is a certain pride in truly composing a recipe or a dish. Fixing a broken formula is tremendously satisfying and engenders a sense of ownership. The very first recipe I ever overhauled ended up producing what is, I believe, the best Dunking Cookie in the history of Ever. It is a mocha dough and a hazelnut dough marbled together and, when immersed in coffee, becomes utterly sublime. It took my family years to convince me to release the recipe to them. I wanted it to be Mine. I am still holding out with the Proprietary Pork Rub. It is possible that Mr. Lebovitz feels the same way about his biscotti; and this is where I get hung up.

But for home cooks and professionals alike, I believe that recipes are more like stories than they are like chapters in books or trade secrets, though they may be those as well. Whenever I make my Corn Cake Crepes, I think of learning to make them in an A La Carte class at school. I can hear the Chef yelling. I can smell the parmesan baskets a colleague was making at the burner next to mine. My grandmother’s buttermilk biscuits are that much better because they came from my Grandmother. I feel an affection towards the recipe that cannot be duplicated in a mere itemization of ingredients and procedures. That love cannot be translated. If nothing else, it is the flexible part, the fairy dust that makes a recipe one’s own.

I will of course continue to publish my recipes and recipes I’ve copied and tweaked from other people’s work. And usually I will write about what they mean to me, hoping that they will become yours, and mean something to you too.