Flash in the Pan

Apparently we have another ongoing cooking plagiarism scandal, this time in the presidential campaign. For the second time, John McCain's wife Cindy has been accused of passing on a recipe taken from another source. This time, the July 2008 issue of Family Circle ran cookie recipes from each candidate's spouse. Someone found that McCain's recipe was virtually identical ("a few minor details" changed) to one on Hersheys.com. In the article, she had attributed the recipe to a friend, and I certainly can see how it would be easy for someone to take a recipe, maybe make some changes, and then put it into a recipe file, not even remembering the original source. There is also the point that a lot of cooking, particularly baking, relies on rations dictated by chemistry.

When I was writing my pizza book, I developed a dough recipe - and eventually learned (long before going to print) that one of my favorite bread books had the identical recipe. I didn't start with that recipe as a reference. Instead, I just put stuff together until it looked and felt right. But there are only so many ratios of flour to water to salt that will give you a particular result. (However, I did mention the unintended similarity in the book - and also heartily recommended the other title, Secrets of a Jewish Baker, which is definitely worth finding used if you like to bake bread.)

So, my sympathy was with Cindy McCain - until I read about the first time this happened in April. John McCain's campaign web site had a number of "her" recipes posted, when someone noticed that many appeared identical to recipes taken from the Food Network's web site. (Really, how many people come up with a passion fruit mousse?) The campaign eventually blamed an unpaid intern, which raises the question of how this person was sent off to find recipes that would be posted as coming from Cindy McCain. If it was a blunder, didn't any of the McCains notice that something was wrong? Or maybe passion fruit is considered a common ingredient in Arizona. And doesn't your family make ahi tuna with napa cabbage slaw or farfalle pasta with turkey sausage, peas and mushrooms? I thought so.

So much for sympathy. By the way, did I tell you about my new cookie recipe?

Labels: plagiarism, politics, recipes

I truly get tired of people with an axe to grind - generally either the subject of a story or some friend or PR person - anonymously replying to blogs, generally with a tone and a relationaship of convenience with various facts that suggest their biases. Come on, folks - if you're going to be a partisan, have the small amount of resiliance to sign your opinions. Otherwise, I (and others like me) are probably going to take what you write and mock your efforts - as I am about to do here.

It was so sad to see mean Jerry go on TV to try to salvage Jessica's reputation. What are the facts:

Sure, he should have kept out of it, but it's his wife. Can you imagine the grief he would have faced if he said, "You know, dear, I think it makes sense for me to stay uninvolved." As for the "facts," I'm guessing from this opening that I'm about to see a carefully chosen recitation of convenient bits of information.

Chef and baby-products mogul Missy Chase Lapine came out in April with a book, “The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals.” Lapine baked her spinach brownies with Al Roker on the “Today” show; Seinfeld shared her spinach brownies with Oprah on that show last week.

How did I know? If you're going to mention who came first, why not mention the book or two on this various subject that came out before 2007? How about that recipes for brownies with spinach started showing up on the web at least in January of 2006? Oh, wait, that might suggest neither author was all that original.

Mothers on Oprah.com and parenting sites have noted similarities after perusing the puree-spattered pages of both. Some wondered whether the wealthy Seinfeld didn’t have cooks who helped cook up her recipes.

Oh, dear, mothers on Oprah.com - could they have been anonymous posters related to this one? Maybe Lapine found recipes on the web or in the books that were already in print before hers. Any interest in doing some comparisons there? No, I didn't think so.

Seinfeld writes about having an epiphany that, “While I was cooking dinner, pureeing butternut squash for the baby and making mac and cheese for the rest of us, I had the crazy idea of stirring a little of the puree into the macaroni. … The colors matched -you couldn’t really see the squash in there -and the texture was perfect.”

Lapine, who founded the Baby Spa natural products line, writes: “If you want to hide something in macaroni and cheese, you have to match the color of the dish. You could easily introduce white bean puree in the mac and cheese.”

And how could you expect that anyone might think of matching colors? Just because peopel have been doing things like this for, oh, DECADES.

Seinfeld and Lapine both have recipes for mashed potatoes with hidden cauliflower, grilled cheese with secret sweet potatoes, green eggs made with pureed baby spinach, and carrot-laced tacos.

For three out of these four, I was able to find something on the web showing that neither book could have been the original of the concept:

• Mashed potatoes with cauliflower (2002)



• Green eggs with pureed spinach (2000)



• Carrot-laced tacos (2007, but apparently a tradition in Mexico)

And I'll bet, with a bit more time, I could find sweet potatoes in a grilled cheese sandwich.

Lapine stayed hidden herself when we called, but Craig Herman, an executive at her publisher, Running Press, said ominously: “I won’t be able to comment until next week.”

Sorry, but isn't it plagiarism to quote something without indicating the source? Or does that only count for cookbooks? (I couldn't make heads or tails of what this "fact" was supposed to mean).

Let's just look at the facts. And, if I was Ms. Lapine, I would certainly challange Jerry for his slanderous comments.

Still waiting for those facts that prove this to be plagiarism. And I'm sure you can challenge Jerry (didn't know you were on a first name basis) - anonymously, of course.

Labels: Jessica Seinfeld, Missy Chase Lapine, plagiarism

Once again I found an anonymous comment, this time on the todo over whether Seinfeld plagiarized Lapine's cookbook. To anonymously try posting a snipping comment to this blog is to invite being mocked in the worst way possible: by the juxtaposition of rambling opinion with fact. (And I'm guessing that the person here is somehow connected with Lapine.) Here is the post:

TWO books which are:

both cookbooks
shown to the same publisher
in the same year
with the same UNIQUE recipes
on the same UNIQUE cooking concept
by authors who live in the same city
with nearly IDENTICAL book covers
both pitched to OPRAH

IS JUST A COINCIDENCE. No way, I smell a rat!

Now let's bring in the fact. First, as any author who has experienced commercial publishing for any length of time can tell you, having two people come up with the same idea at about the same time is normal. When you've got something like 180,000 new books published every year in the US, and many of the ideas are driven by common cultural values and events, then you're going to have a fair amount of duplication.

The books don't have "the same unique recipes." I direct the poster and readers to this level-headed article in Slate. Here's an interesting paragraph:

Spend 10 minutes comparing the Seinfeld and Lapine books, and you won't be able to seriously contend that there is plagiarism. (And in all the articles I've found about this tempest in a teapot, not one has pointed to a specific example of plagiarism.) Sure, the two books are based on the same unremarkable, unoriginal idea. And a handful of recipes employ some of the same obvious tricks (mostly based on hue, such as hiding sweet potato puree in a grilled cheese sandwich or spinach in brownies). But the books are quite different. For example, Seinfeld's recipe, titled "Mashed Potatoes," calls for simple cauliflower puree. Lapine's recipe for "Mystery Mashed Potatoes" specifies "White Puree," which is a separate recipe earlier in the book that consists of cauliflower, zucchini, and lemon juice. In a table comparing recipes, a New York Times blog notes that both books contain "Peanut Butter and Jelly Muffins" without noting that, among several other differences, Seinfeld calls for carrot puree while Lapine calls for "orange puree," based on sweet potatoes with the addition of carrots. Not that either trick is a revelation—fleshy vegetables like sweet potatoes and carrots have long been ingredients in cakes, pies, breads, and muffins.

As the article also notes, Chris Fisk's Sneaky Veggies was another book on the same theme. However, it came out before either Seinfeld's or Lapine's - and the time it takes to produce books would pretty much eliminate the chance that Seinfeld or her publisher (or the list of people involved, as the Slate piece notes) could have seen Lapine's book, copied it, and gotten to press in the time they had. The publisher may have seen Lapine's proposal - along with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of others at the same time - but it's unlikely that there would have been enough detail in recipes to allow true copying, even if they recipes were identical.

As I mentioned in my other entry on this subject, hiding vegetables in other foods for kids is hardly a novel cooking concept. There are web recipes that predate all of these titles, and I bet if I spent, oh, about 15 minutes in our extensive cookbook collection, I could find similar recipes. Nearly identical book covers? That has nothing to do with the authors, as they have virtually no say in what is on the cover. (You're lucky if the publisher even asks you - though it looks like I will get to shoot the cover photo of the dessert book I'm currently putting together, which should be fun. Particularly when I get to eat the main prop.)

And both books pitched to Oprah! Oh, my, now there's the smoking gun. Both publishers or their PR people pitched these books to the Oprah Winfrey Show - along with the other 50,000 books that people were pushing. This is like saying there is something suspicious because two separate people actually have to breathe to exist. Getting on Oprah is one of the biggest - and most standard - ways to get significant book sales. What did you expect these people to do? Not even try?

To be fair, sometimes publishers do questionable things. I've known writers who had a publisher kick them off projects, which they had created (one got a fair sum of money in a law suit), or who had a publisher offer a look at a similar proposal (the writer turned that opportunity down). But to create a duplicate book? Nah, it would be too much work for the publisher to bother with. I realize that conspiracy theories may be more fun, but that's fiction, a topic I cover in my En Words blog.

Labels: cookbooks, Jessica Seinfeld, Missy Chase Lapine, plagiarism