Whose Recipe Is It Anyway?

Are you ready for the postmodernist cookbook? Two new releases--”The Best American Recipes 1999” (Houghton Mifflin, $26) and “Best of the Best” (Food & Wine Books, $29.95) are composed entirely of recipes lifted from other cookbooks (in the case of the first, newspapers, magazines and Web sites as well).

These are the publishing equivalent of those “Hooray for Hollywood!” cinema compilations--movies made up of clips from other movies. The first book, edited by Suzanne Hamlin and Fran McCullough, is a fairly straightforward listing of recipes from various sources, including The Los Angeles Times. The second, edited by former Food & Wine magazine editor Judith Hill, goes further, selecting the 35 best cookbooks of the year (how did she pick that number?) and then offering a selection of recipes--each in its original book’s typeface, with a shot of the book’s cover and photographs from the book. In effect, it is a giant piece of sales material for the selected works--sales material for which you pay full price.

All of this raises interesting questions; most obvious: Who owns a recipe? In fact, the answer is nobody, because they are not protected by copyright law (all recipes in these books are credited, although in “Best American” you must search the back of the book).

This leads to some peculiarly postmodern quandaries. In “Best American,” for example, Marion Cunningham’s Buttermilk Pancakes are not credited to Cunningham but to Peter Reinhart, who collected the recipe in his book “Crust and Crumb.” Another recipe, for Breakthrough Polenta, is credited to Paula Wolfert’s excellent “Mediterranean Grains and Greens,” but in that book she details its rather convoluted history, involving at least one other cookbook, a newspaper column and the back of a bag of cornmeal. Truly, there’s no such thing as an original sin.