Good Cooking since 1995
Are Recipes on the Internet Original?
I'm totally amazed that so many people turn to the Internet to find recipes these days
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I'm totally amazed that so many people turn to the Internet to find
recipes these days but then again, if you don' t have a cookbook
collection what else can you do? Hey, what are you doing---"I'm
searching for a recipe to cook for dinner", or "I'm searching for a
chocolate chip cookie recipe", is often heard in many households. Which
one will you choose and will it be a good one is the big question! Well,
providing you search on a reputable site such as Epicurious, Gourmet and
a few others, including goodcooking.com, you will more than likely be
happy with your selection. In your search you might wind up on Aunt
Tilly's page with hundreds of recipes that she's posted---but did you
know Aunt Tilly is a terrible cook?! In fact her children would rather
eat at a friend's house than at home, ouch! Yet you say to yourself,
"this recipe sounds good", not knowing what her kids think of it. And
you don't even know that she copied the recipe from Cousin Mary and then
tweaked a few ingredients to her liking and called it her own. Guess
what, Mary is a terrible cook too! It's on the Internet it must be good
you say. It's time to wake up!!!
Well so it goes, hundreds of
recipes are floating around that represent this scenario and then they
get copied, and reposted as "my recipe" without ever being tested, that
is, actually made by the person to taste for themselves, before they go
online. To top it off, others then copy Aunt Tilly's recipes and repost
them as their own. This is perfectly legal because a recipe cannot be
copyrighted. Julia Child once told me to consider it a form of flattery,
someone thought your recipe was so good that they copied and perhaps
tweaked it to look like their own and then to pass it on as their
own--but that was before the Internet came about with hundreds of
cooking sites vying for market share.
Cooking is a skill, it's
about learning techniques and not all in the recipe itself.
Let's look at similarities:
I am looking at the
ingredients and not really the order of them or the method of cooking.
For example, I'm not comparing the amount of time you cook the macaroni
or for how you boil the milk, microwave or stove top. You might put
croutons on top, a dash of paprika or slices of tomatoes. I want to see
ratios and similar or not, so similar ingredients and amounts.
Amount of
milk, butter, flour, cheese, salt, pepper and macaroni is point
of comparison and will lead to a deduction, somewhat like
a Sherlock Holmes of the food world. Look at them they all are
so alike! Is it funny that hundreds of recipes are copied for cookbooks and
recipes sites and then tweaked to suite the needs of the the website. It is
so easy to say this is my recipe, I didn't copy it but changing 1 tsp. to
3/4 tsp. and copying the preparation method is copying. It happens all
the time! Did you know recipes aren't considered copyright material! An acceptable
asterisk (*) note, if you do copy/tweak one, is to say "adapted from" i.e.
"Adapted from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking". I've
seen this done in major publications and websites.