agreed

recipes are merely suggestions that may or may not be T&T ... but are helpful in our culinary journey through life. Subjective too ... I like walnuts, SWMBO does not. so we compromise ... we also share the soapy taste thing on cilantro. I get it, however, when folks feel proprietary about a recipe ... it will probably die with them ... which is sad ... god recipes should be shared and enjoyed.

While I do agree that someone should be able to make a recipe to suit their own tastes.....

I also think that when you change one thing, it is no longer the recipe. It's a different one. Especially if the change is a major component of the dish,such as the meat. Example, someone wanted my pasta meat sauce recipe. They then decided to swap the ground beef and Italian sausage with ground Turkey and Turkey sausage and leave out the COM soup. Okay. If you generally prefer those things than by all means,sub away, but it's not my recipe. So don't tell people it is please.

I tend to be stingy with my recipes, because people irritate me with the subs and omissions. Make up your own recipe for whatever it is you want to make and make it as healthy as you want. But don't sully my recipe with your vegan "cheese" and zoodles.

I rarely follow a recipe. Though use them for ideas and inspiration. Especially when trying to solve a revisited ingredient. Cooking with seasonal fresh ingredients or something new in the market, I search a few or a dozen ideas. Change or cut back what I don't have....or if too much sugars, salt, ...I can tell it will be too much.

So no, it is no longer the original but might be inspired by.

Cultural spice blends I do pay attention. They work for a reason. If I don't have an ingredient, no sweat. Many substitutions work fine.

Recipe writing isn't rocket science but some do it much better than others. I learned basic methods from Marcella Hazan, Laurels Kitchen 30yrs ago. And a few others.

Cooking a meal, being creative, using flavors you like and your family prefers should be stress-free and fun and challenging. Not a run around town looking for rare ingredients out of season.

Baking is another beast. I will always start from the original, then experiment with yogurt instead of cream, less or no sugar, savory over sweet, ...but would never blame my substitutions on the original.

There are a few people who will NOT EVER get a recipe of mine.

With my friends, I freely share and ask them to take all the compliments, whether or not they change it up, but I also ask them--if they do change it up considerably-- to say that it's their recipe.

The way I reply to them-that-begs (who will NOT EVER get a recipe from me) is to tell them that I found the recipe somewhere online, suggest that they do a google search or try allrecipes.com. That seems to take care of things.

Clearly it’s a grey area, bloggers seem to use “adapted from” a lot. In some cases reducing the salt by a quarter teaspoon seems to qualify as adapted. Whatever, I think it succeeds in both giving attribution and taking ownership for tweaks in case someone (esp the original author) doesn’t appreciate having their recipe misrepresented.

In conversation I tend to say “I essentially followed the recipe from XYZ” when that’s the case, and might mention significant changes.

Plus, if they don't change the wording much, it's a potential copyright violation.

For me, it depends on how much I used the recipe. I follow some to the letter (including ones I invented in the first place). Others, I merely refer to for ideas about ingredients and organization or method, but then just putter about doing my own thing and don't really follow them at all. I've been known to "invent" a recipe by combining bits and pieces of three different recipes, and while I didn't follow any single one of them, I do feel like it's adaptation rather than authorship.

Still, sometimes I'll change a few things, but still feel like I essentially made the same recipe. Like adjusting the salt level to suit us or seeing that it needs more or less moisture and adjusting accordingly. Actually, I did both of those things when I made the blue cheese shortbread cookies posted, IIRC, by Chloebud. That's one weird-ass recipe. I was wondering as I made it who came up with it. It has to be either someone who knows way more baking science than I (i'm no expert, but not a novice either), or someone who has been doing a lot of GF or other alternative baking and has a good handle on using starches, etc. I definitely stuck close enough to the recipe to make it come out even though I used a wetter cheese than the norm and adjusted, and left out a bunch of salt (they were exquisite!). I would say that the recipe as written is a good recipe, even though I didn't make it exactly, and would say that too. I have no doubt it would come out great if followed exactly.

And I think that's the issue. If you substitute spinach for kale and deal with the water issues, your souffle isn't going to be so different that it's something entirely new. I mean, unless you try to tell your guests it's kale. :) It's just souffle X with spinach instead of kale. If you use it as a template for making a rhubarb souffle, you've used the recipe, but you haven't made the recipe. There's a heck of a bigger difference between rhubarb and kale than between spinach and kale, and you'd have to have processed the rhubarb well outside of the scope of the recipe.

I might say that I got the original recipe from "Whomever" but that I've changed it somewhat.

What really irritates me is when someone claims a recipe to be theirs when it is not... and allows it to be published. OR, when I give a friend a recipe saying where I got it and they publish it giving me full credit for something that I said wasn't mine. grrrrrr.

(Sorry about the mini rant.)

I was told by a food scientist (who did recipe testing as well as creating new recipes for a major food company) that to be considered "new" there has to be FIVE (5) changes. But they don't have to be major changes -- they could be as simple as original recipe says "add eggs" and you change it to "add 3 eggs, one at a time". It's the same but different.

I've been told that recipes cannot be copyrighted. Cookbooks are -- the wording before and after the recipes and the pictures but the recipes themselves cannot.

And actually, if you just change a word or two (I've seen 2 1/2 cups of "all-purpose" flour and you write 2 1/2 c. flour) is that the same recipe or not. Obviously in that instance you're specifiying a certain kind of flour -- in the other example you're not although that is what most of us use and if it says flour that's what I use -- all-purpose rather than cake flour or bread flour.

So basically it could be the same end result just go about it in a different way.

Martha

I don' t usually change recipes up much except for quantities.....I will add more, or less of XYZ depending on what I may have on hand or our taste preference . Must admit 90 % of what I cook is based on ........what I cook. No recipes involved.....at least not for a very long time. Bet I don't use a " recipe" more than twice a month.

Baking being the exception . When baking I am anal about following the recipe to the tee.

I usually follow a recipe the first time (except for salt, don't go there), then just use it as guidelines. I'm with chase about baking pretty much follow!.

When I make a family recipe and someone asks for the recipe I kinda go blank, cause I just do it by rote (kinda like driving to sister Kathie's place, you turn at the yellow house, then after the creek there's a driveway)

I like allrecipes, but it drives me nuts when people review a recipe and they have changed about 75% of the recipe! Review it as is, or don't do it!

I try to give credit where credit is due, and will name my source. I am also happy to share recipes when asked - and sometimes even when not asked ; D

I do a lot of tweaking and often use recipes as a jumping off point - even in baking. After cooking for many years I'm fairly comfortable in swapping or subtracting things. Once you understand proportions and principles for baked goods, it's not so hard.

What ticks me off is all those appropriated recipes one finds in blogs, etc. that may not even be complete. I suspect some folks are just clueless about such things.

I don't think recipes are engraved in stone, not even simple ones or old ones.

The recipes we have were probably changed many times before they came to us, for a variety of reasons. We only get the most recent iteration to be published or shared

And it will be changed again and again, depending on taste, availability of ingredients, time, cooking needs, etc.

We certainly don't cook like the recipes in Mrs. Beeton's Cookery Book and Household Guide, or American Cookery, but we make food with the same names that appear in those books

I remember a few years ago I saw a recipe for muffins on a local blog. It was stolen from a popular cookbook in the 80's. I wrote to her and told her that it wasn't hers, it was right out of the Muffin Mania cookbook, and the book is copyrighted.

Was the recipe in the book adapted from someone else's recipe?

The copyright laws have been changed since I knew about them, and I'm not a lawyer so only knew as much as I needed to, but it used to be that as soon as a work was in its final form (no further changes), you had an automatic copyright to it, even without registering. People used to mail their manuscripts to themselves, with a signature over the envelope flap edge, so it would be obvious if it were opened, and use the postmark as proof of the finished version. I've heard, but not directly from an authoritative source, that in many cases you have to register to have an enforceable copyright nowadays.

You can't copyright a title, an idea, or something that's common knowledge (e.g., flour, water, yeast, salt) or something existing in the public domain (Mary had a little lamb). The only thing you have copyright over is your own words as you wrote them. I've read in the newspaper about cases in entertainment where suits were won on the basis of substantial appropriation, even with the words changed. That's where they could prove that the plagiarist had access to the original work, and changed the characters' names and many of the exact words of the dialog to make it appear different on the surface, but where it was really the same script in essence. You can't copyright a plot--there's nothing new under the sun--so that kind of thing has to be really egregious. It may be that there are also covenants in the industry that go beyond what ordinary law states and which are enforceable, or something like that.

My understanding about food is that it's both harder and simpler. You can't copyright ingredients. You can't copyright basic directions such as "cream butter and sugar" which is common knowledge. But you can copyright your particular words such as, "Aunt Sarah always said that you have to always beat in a clockwise direction. I don't know why, because you can't "unbeat" the ingredients, unless, perhaps, it was because of the way she held the spoon, because you wouldn't want the bowl of the wooden spoon to be scooping up all the butter and keeping it it from combining with the sugar. Even worse, the purpose of "creaming" is to beat air into the butter, and you wouldn't want some of the butter to miss out on that! Fat is good at holding air and will make a lighter and more delicate crumb with all that lovely air in it. Whether you use a wooden spoon, like Aunt Sarah, or an electric mixer, you want to make sure that all the sugar is incorporated and evenly distributed, and that the mixture is pale and fluffy looking, from all that air, when you're done."

"Changing five things" is an old saw which may or may not make it into something new enough to stand up as original. Little things like adding or subtracting a word won't cut it. That's like changing the names in the story. They have to be substantial differences. A bran muffin is a bran muffin, and common knowledge. Add orange zest, cointreau, sultanas, brewed coffee instead of water, and bake in clay flower pots and you have something unique. Just add orange zest and you have a regular bran muffin with orange zest. Not unique. Keep in mind that substantive changes are key.

It is possible that the muffin recipe that was lifted from the book wasn't unique enough for a copyright even if it was used word for word. OTOH, it's also true that no matter if it's a copyright violation or not, if the blog wasn't profiting from the recipe (and that's directly making money from that particular recipe), or if you can prove clearly that it being on that blog significantly affected sales of the book downward, it's a moot point whether it's technically a violation or not. Without monetary damages there's no possible judgment, and without court action (you can only sue for monetary damages), the only recourse is for the author to request to the bloggist or hosting service that the recipe be removed.

With the internet, holding onto copyrights is ever more difficult. Commercial entities care, because they are supposed to be profiting. Some little blogger being supported by annoying ads and the occasional donation does not care if she's in violation or not. In general, the free flow of information on the 'net is more respected than ownership or even authorship (song lyrics are listed by the name of the singer, not the writer).

My point here is basically that copyright is beside the point. We give attribution because it's the right thing to do. Respect is a greater currency than cash.

What I hate is when people write a review and give the recipe a low mark...go on to tell about all the things they changed and it didn't turn out. I have seen some people comment that they shouldn't leave a review if they changed the recipe so drastically.

I almost always change things except if I'm baking...I pretty much keep to the recipe. But like if I'm making a casserole, I will likely use something different, maybe I will leave out a spice that I don't care for or maybe not use as much sugar. I'd say that sugar is a big one that I change. So many people seems to just love sugar in everything. Sometimes it is needed for flavor but not as much as they suggest.

Thank you so much for your thoughts. I will definitely use the word adapted if and when I ever pass a recipe on. For myself I can't eat so many things so the recipes are virtually unrecognizable except for the spices and hopefully the flavour.

Every so often I get frustrated... Right now I especially miss having wheat instead of cottage cheese or cream cheese and eggs for my wraps. I would love to just pull out a recipe and make flat bread or wraps without having to think what can I use instead of this and what can I use instead of that.

Mankind tends to be lazy and does not want to recreate the wheel, or discover how to make fire, or test a strange mushroom or smoke a certain weed to see if it won't kill you, so I think recipes based on others' suggestions are just that, suggestions.

I like the 'inspired by so and so's recipe' as acceptable verbiage for credit. It is doubtful many of our recipes are original creations anyway (we all poach an egg differently) ... and recipes/concepts/suggestions have been handed down/over/across the ages. "I like what [insert a name here] makes and I want to try something similar." Perhaps this imitation is the best form of flattery ...

I like pepper and cayenne mixed together, but it is doubtful you or I would use the same proportions. I have a heavy hand with black pepper and add the cayenne so the mixture shines brightly. I know what that means ... but it will be different for you ...

Also like to make salsa, and people ask me to make it for them.

I say, which one? Do you want peppers in your salsa, or, do you want tomatoes in your salsa?

M2CW

Oh yes I forgot about the inspired by phrase. Another beautiful choice. Thanks Bragu.

Also thanks for the sweet peppers salsa idea if that's what you meant. I love red green orange any color of peppers really so this is one I will definitely try and can try :-). What is your recipe please?

no two batches are ever the same. I start with a mix of mrs wages' seasoning .. and then go from there swapping out the proportions for tomatoes and peppers. I use hot peppers, habaneros and jalapeño and occasionally a whole ghost pepper which gets discarded after heating but before canning. also throw in more paprika and even Worcestershire and a dab of liquid smoke. I use ac vinegar exclusively.

Annie has a very pleasant salsa recipe.

Annie's salsa recipe

If someone asks of a recipe that I have altered, I give them the original plus my version. That way I don't feel as if I am falsely claiming it as my own. The recipient might prefer the original, or choose to make different alterations. It is easier if the original ingredients and amounts are known.