You can’t sit down
to write a recipe without wondering what constitutes out-and-out thievery. There is no possible way that you yourself could
invent something so absolutely new and startling that you could proudly call it
yours and yours alone. Everything has
to have come from some knowledge that you picked up from someone or somewhere
else. But giving credit where it is due
isn’t the way of some major talents in the food galaxy. I can’t run this down but it sounds
apocryphal enough to be true: One of the
greatest doyennes of cooking is said to have recognized so many of the recipes
of a then younger upstart that she remarked ‘’she is a superb copier”. But at what point are we not all copiers,
superb or not?
One theory holds
that if three ingredients are different, whatever recipe it is, is therefore
original. Another is that as long as you
attribute your recipe to its original developer, you’re covered. I
suppose if you went back to the very beginnings, you’d have to give credit to
the man who invented fire or discovered that you could boil water. But if you go to the rules governing Recipe
contests, here’s what you’ll find:
Changing one or two ingredients in someone else’s recipe does not make
it original. And if you have the
temerity to change the ingredients and still lift the instructions for the
recipe from whatever it is you made the substitutions to, that isn’t
originality, it’s plagiarism. And while recipes cannot be copyrighted,
cookbooks most certainly can. Which
brings us to the great Alfred Portale, who must be given a lot of credit for
the Snapper recipe here.
