Cookbooks vs Online Recipes, Copyright, & Best Recipes

Is the cookbook dead? /s

Post internet, print cookbooks and magazines are definitely not as popular as they once were. People tend to google recipes. A search for "banana bread" gets me several recipe agglomeration websites as well as personal blogs, many with modifications in the comments or reviews. Recipe titles have words such as "best", "favorite", "classic", and "healthy".

Just looked up recipe copyright, and ingredients/steps are not copyrighted, only the language.

So some questions.

Do you guys primarily use print recipes, internet recipes, or your own mind to cook? Do print or web recipes give better results?

How often do you think web recipes rewrite recipes from cookbooks without giving credit? What do you think about this?

Is the "best" recipe approach valid, so recipe writers will converge on a true recipe, or is there so much leeway in cooking that this shouldn't really happen by chance?

I mostly use print, because I can stand the recipe book on the microwave and refer to it as I go along (gives me a better chance of not omitting a vital ingredient). On the relatively rare occasions that I use web recipes (often pointed out by the indefatigable MrsLee) the nearest safe place to stand the laptop is on the dining-room table, which makes for a certain amount of scurrying around at critical moments, often for no better reason than to wake the display.

Knowing the number of times I've read several recipes for the same thing, taken the average and then gone and done something else, I doubt very much that the idea of a "true recipe" is anything other than a chimaera. This works in my favour when cooking Roman or other ancient recipes: I don't need to question my use of Thai fish sauce for liquamen or garum, and moskonfyt or jerepigo for the various grades of Roman condensed grape juice.

I have also seen to many attempts to 'improve' a recipe that totally missed what the dish was about.

I can put my iPad where I would put a print cookbook, but I find that the screen needs waking up just as my hands are covered in something that isn't good on screens. However, I seldom follow a recipe closely, so that isn't the biggest problem with web recipes. You don't know who wrote it, how well it was tested, what sort of ingredients they have access to how accurate their oven thermometer is, ... and therefore how much you can trust them. If I have made several other recipes in a cookbook I can adjust for many of these factors. Not to mention that the big publishers insist on a fairly good level of accuracy.

>1 Settings: "Do you guys primarily use print recipes, internet recipes, or your own mind to cook?"

Yes. :)

Have to run to get ready for work now, more later.

There’s an app called Paprika, available for iPhone, iPad and Mac (at least) which will collect, index and format recipes, and seems to override the screen blanking on an iPad so you don’t have to keep waking the screen up. Downside of course is the hit to your battery life. Also, the app is not free, and all versions have to be paid for separately.

I am NOT a good cook, but I do enjoy the unusual/strange/quirky. thus I usually just print a recipe from the net. Problem of course is how to organise these printouts :-)

"Ideal recipe" reminds me of the alchemical hunt for gold. The question is only what's ideal for us.

My working recipe book is a thin (so it opens perfectly flat or folds easily, as necessary) notebook in which I scribble down everything I need to reproduce some cooking feat. It's tattered and besplattered, partially burnt and wavy with liquid stains but still legible. I'd like to see an iPad perform like that. ;)

>6 guido47:

High-tech solutions alert: mine are stapled in one corner and placed inside the notebook when not in use or out when in.

At this stage of my life, I generally cook without recipes for our daily fare. I will use a recipe (from either a cookbook or online) when I have an ingredient I don't know what to do with, or when I am wanting to explore a different cuisine or culture, or when I need an infusion or inspiration of "something different" to wake up our taste buds.

So for instance, yesterday we had run out of the food I had cooked over the weekend. Yikes! I had to cook on a weeknight! I looked in the fridge. There were bits of leftover roasted chicken, celery, broccoli and carrots. I always try to have fresh ginger and onions on hand. The equation added up to stir-fry in my head. Lately I have been watching Marion Grasby cooking videos on YouTube and she did a terrific beef stir-fry which I wrote down ingredients for on a piece of notepaper which is currently floating in my pile of similar notepapers on top of my cookbooks.

I asked my husband to chop the veggies and pull the chicken meat from the bones before I got home from work. When I got home, I looked at that list of ingredients, sort of followed it, chopped up some ginger, garlic and Thai chili, then started cooking. It was fantastic.

So as a rule, I use recipes as a guideline, unless it's something I've never tried before, then I follow it exactly. Except for baking, when I bake I follow recipes, except for biscuits (American baking powder biscuits) and pancakes. Those my brain just knows how to do without recipes anymore.

I embrace all recipe formats. I first got inspired through the cookbooks my mom had, the cooking shows we watched on PBS, and her written recipes. Today I use all these methods as well as the internet. There are a few original recipes I created based on acquired cooking knowledge.

After I see a recipe, I compare various recipes considering taste preference, ingredients on hand, overall current nutritional knowledge. I look through cookbooks I own, public domain cookbooks that are online, and do web searches. I don't see one method as being the go to method. Instead I see them all as more tools for the modern cook and baker.

In regards to copywrite with recipes I think this gets really tricky. If someone posts the directions word for word, yeah I think this is very questionable. But a lot of times recipes evolve or in some cases become mainstream, then the line gets really fuzzy. Take the Nestle Tolhouse Chocolate chip cookie, do we give credit every time we post chocolate chip cookie recipes to them.

Print recipes because you could limit it to the kind of style and ingridients that you would normally use. When you google you often get something with odd ingredients that you normally wouldn't use. I also find it a bit easier to get back to the same recipe after the planning stage. I mean first I look up the ingredients, then I do my weekly shopping and then I need the same recipe after a couple of days. I also use a lot of older cookbooks because they are often better adapted to the season.

If you google a recipe you can bookmark it, which might just be easier than remembering which cookbook and page.

>9 BooksandMovies: Like you, I use a variety of sources. Currently I tend to save online recipes to pinterest, though forkchop is actually much more useful (recipe-specific, allowing notes and tags to be added). I would love to find a workable way to include printed recipes, having tried several of the ones which have cookery book databases. I keep thinking about writing my own, but its a lot of work and I'm lazy!

>12 sarahemmm: I can totally relate about needing a smoother system for storing recipes. For me it is the idea recipes that I come across online. I have these steamed across Pinterest, bookmarks on my electronic devices, and screenshots from old public domain cookbooks. ... I think if I got all these shifted to Pinterest and just set aside 45 minutes each weekend to shift and clean out as needed this would help me.

However I have more of a system for recipes I have printed off and tried, Any recipe I try and decide I like , I add notes as needed, then I place it in a nice pretty scrapbook binder with my other like recipes. Any recipe I try and decide I do not like, I note on the recipe and store in a folder envelope until I decide if I want to try to find a different version of the recipe or just pass.

I don't use Pinterest, but I have the Paprika app (www.paprikaapp.com) on 2 computers, an iPhone and an iPad. It works well for saving recipes found on line, but you can also type directly into the various fields, or if you have the Microsoft Lens app, which can do OCR, you can scan the printed text with Lens, OCR it and paste the result into Paprika. Works for me. Only drawback is, the Paprika app is not free, and they charge separately for each installation.

I'd still rather use a paid app than any kind of social media.

>14 haydninvienna: I lurv Paprika!! I like that I can grab the recipe from online and even if the site dies (I see you Never Bashful With Butter), I know where the recipe came from.

ETA: Do you do any of the YAML importing of recipes to Paprika? I have a huge backlog of recipes that I've been converting to YAML and then loading.

>15 lesmel: Er, what's YAML? (I managed to translate the "ML" to "markup language" and then had to look it up.) Does Paprika use some sort of markup scheme?

I just type or copy and paste for anything Paprika can't import directly.

>14 haydninvienna: I correct myself: Paprika doesn't charge for each installation. I've just added it to this laptop for no extra money.

Just noticed this thread and have a couple of things to add. While recipes are not copyrighted, honorable chefs follow a practice of either attributing the recipe to its source, or changing at least three ingredients (or two ingredients and a unique procedure) before they can claim it as an original recipe. (Years ago I was the online editor for Cook’s Illustrated and tracking down recipe thefts was a big item). Second, for those of you who have lots of online cookbooks, Eat My Books has thousands of cookbooks loaded by recipe name and ingredients, and you easily search the database to direct you to the right cookbook and page (obviously they don’t reproduce the entire recipe). Hope this helps, and I really applaud those of you who create original home meals!

I do both. Sometimes I want a type of recipe that just isn't in any of my cookbooks - and I have a lot of cookbooks now. I got a cookbook stand from somewhere (Williams-Sonoma? Target? I have no idea) which is great.

One thing about online recipes is there's that website I can't remember the name of where you can tell it what ingredients you have and it'll give you recipes that will work with those ingredients, so you don't have to spend forever looking through a cookbook and finding a recipe but on it needs onions and you don't have any!

Recipes aren't copyrighted because there are only so many permutations of, for instance, a recipe for beef stew. There's also actually a particular rule for copyright that works that serve a functional purpose can't be copyrighted - so things like tv instruction manuals or the blueprints for how to make a screw, and I would think that food recipes would fall under the umbrella of "functional purpose." So technically as long as the photos and flavor text were different you could just republish an entire cookbook and you wouldn't be breaking the law, although that would be really gross to do that.

What a weird thread for State of the Thing to be like "hey things are heating up over here" since the first post is from 2019?

>19 momelimberham: "What a weird thread for State of the Thing to be like "hey things are heating up over here" since the first post is from 2019?"

Well, is is in a cooking group, so, you know, heat. ;)

I would like an actual IP lawyer to join this discussion — better still, 2 IP lawyers, one from the US and the other from the UK or Australia. I'm a lawyer of sorts (Australian) but not an IP lawyer. What follows is from my non-expert perspective, and it isn't up to the standard of rigour proper to legal advice and must not be taken as such.

When we assert that a "recipe" is subject to copyright, what do we actually mean? As >19 momelimberham: says, there are only so many permutations of beef stew (lots of prior art, as I understand the expression is). However, to take an actual example, I look in 7 Days of Dinner by Adam Liaw, which happens to be on the chair beside me (yes, really) and on p 142 I find a recipe for "Stockman's stew", which is a beef stew. On p  143 there is a photograph of a preparation of the stew. The recipe is a little unusual in that it includes Vegemite  — Liaw is Australian, after all. But the inclusion of Vegemite is a step in a manufacturing process of sorts, and on my understanding as a non-expert could be the subject of a patent application (except that it's fairly obvious, and really? going through all the fag of a patent application just for that?) but there is no copyright as such in an idea. What is copyrightable is the expression of the idea. So Adam's stew with Vegemite could perhaps be patented, but what is most definitely subject to copyright is the expression of that idea on pp 142 and 143 of the book. Reproduce that without the appropriate licence from the publisher and you might be in trouble. Unfortunately, it isn't too easy to work out what "reproduce" means. The publication for sale of a literal copy would certainly infringe the copyright, but as we start altering this and that and publishing the result, there must come a time where it's no longer an infringing copy.

My first conclusion is that a "recipe"in the sense of the abstract process for making a certain beef stew is not subject to copyright but could in principle be patented, if the issues with obviousness and prior art could be overcome. A particular expression of that process is in principle subject to copyright. But there are limitations to the copyright, and there is where my knowledge starts to unravel. First limitation is the right to fair, non-commercial use by a person other than the copyright owner. Next there is probably a right to store a copy of a copyrighted document in a filing system. That's all we need to keep our copies as long as we are not republishing other people's recipes. If we are republishing recipes, we need to get some properly qualified advice. (I suspect that what >18 NellieMc: meant by "recipe thefts" was the literal copying of other people's recipes, which would indeed infringe their copyright.)

As I said above, I'm not an expert. But I remember clearly being told back at Macquarie University in 1980-whatever that copyright existed not to protect creativity but to protect work. Thinking up a new way to make beef stew is not copyrightable, but the expression of the steps to make "beef stew my way" is.

The International Convention on the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works speaks of the "moral right" of creators. I haven't sought to deal with that. Note though that in most books now there is a statement in the front matter that the author's moral rights have been asserted. That's a whole other topic — the author's moral rights.

>16 haydninvienna: YAML = Yet Another Markup Language. Which is weird and dumb. Why do we need another one? lol You can see an example on the help pages: https://www.paprikaapp.com/help/windows/ (it doesn't matter what OS, the example is on all of the pages). I use it because I have a lot of typed up recipes in Word or Pages. Or have scanned photos. It makes it easier for me to go through a complete collection of photos or documents, write up the recipes into one file, and import.

Quite a few online recipes that are vegetarian seem to be borrowing heavily from landmark vegetarian cookbooks from leading authors like Deborah Madison, Laurel Robertson, and the like. I avoid any such websites or blogs. Legally, recipes that have at least one different ingredient can be copyrighted in the USA by a new author, I read somewhere. Some iPhone recipes ( via the News feed) have been helpful to me ... recently, the Washington Post newspaper has loosened smartphone access to many of their cooking articles, so I've been reading their ideas on making paneer at home, C00K's magazine article titled "Curry Rice is always a good idea," Tasting Table's "21 Delicious Vegetarian Recipes to whip up for Thanksgiving," and from CBS News, a video clip recipe for sugar cookies that uses raspberries in the topping ... a great idea. I recently discovered that organic raspberries are an outstanding ingredient for some salad dressings, cookie frostings, probably cake frosting as well ... just strain out the raspberry seeds before adding to your recipe ... tastes best when used within 4 days. It's important to use organic ingredients when selecting thin-skinned fruits, since otherwise, pesticides are too easily absorbed thru the fruit skins. In all these iPhone News recipes, I adapt them to my family's needs.

I have yet to find an online recipe that I like; breads, meats, veggies...they just don't "turn me on". On the other hand, I have one slow cooker cookbook and I love everything I 've tried from it.

The one recipe I look up again and again is that for pancakes. Because I'm bad at remembering the measurements. Otherwise I mostly don't care from which book I get the recipe as I mostly adopt it to what's in the pantry anyway.