A little over a month ago, a scandal shook the cookbook world. It all began when Masterchef UK alumna Elizabeth Haigh released her inaugural cookbook Makan in May this year, in tribute to her Peranakan lineage (her mother is Nyonya and originates from Singapore).
A few months later, the book was pulled from bookshelves after Singaporean cookbook author Sharon Wee alleged that Haigh had plagiarised at least 15 recipes and – even more shockingly – memories from her cookbook, Cooking in a Nyonya Kitchen, published in 2012.
A quick comparison of the two cookbooks shows that Wee’s claim is warranted, more so when the memory replication is taken into account.
Haigh’s situation is a textbook case of someone copying another person’s recipes almost verbatim and attempting to pass them off as her own.
This isn’t necessarily a problem if you are recreating these recipes for a dinner party or for friends and family, because no one would be the wiser. And many of us are probably guilty of “forgetting” to mention that no, we did not invent this amazing dish – it came from a cookbook or website.
But when a recipe is published in the public domain, this is when things get sticky. Straightforward reproduction (like what Haigh more or less did) is easier to suss out, but when a recipe varies – even minutely – from the original source material, determining ownership is not so cut and dry.
This is also because one person’s base recipe could be another person’s source of inspiration. Cutting and pasting could be part of the origins of a new recipe, but it may not be all of it. And these seemingly minor modifications can birth an entirely new creation altogether.
So given the moving parts that make up recipe composition, this posits an interesting question: what constitutes recipe theft?
For example, if you add an additional ingredient or tweak the measurements in a recipe, does that make the recipe yours or the person you got it from? Perhaps for instance, you replicated a recipe for lemongrass chicken but omitted the lemongrass altogether. Wouldn’t that make it altogether alien from the original recipe?
Also, recipes are intrinsically changeable, so what happens if you revise the cooking sequence, substitute an ingredient or use a slightly different technique from a published recipe and publish it as your own?
Then there is the problem of determining the true source of a recipe, something that can be difficult to ascertain when oral tradition has prevailed for centuries in a country like Malaysia.
When recipes are learnt by watching someone else cook (most often with no measurements involved), the next person who makes it employs their own culinary sensibilities, which by right, should make the recipe uniquely their own if they choose to publish it, right?
These are all questions to which answers can be difficult to establish. But it is worth taking a look at, if for no other reason than to uncover the sort of best practices that established cookbook authors and recipe creators adhere to, to avoid situations like the one Haigh found herself in.
Attributing credit
According to corporate lawyer Salwah Abdul Shukor, who is experienced in intellectual property advisory work, reproducing a cookbook author’s published recipes (which are copyrighted) is only problematic when the person reproducing it does so without crediting the original source and has the potential to make monetary gains through this reproduction.
“There’s very clear exceptions to when you can use someone’s work - for research, if you are reporting or doing critique of the work and thirdly for purposes of studies, those kinds of things are allowed.
“But if it is used in a cookbook or even a blog or YouTube channel where it could translate to commercial returns and revenue, then it enters the copyright space, rather than plagiarism. Copyright infringement is when you extract work from someone else’s efforts,” says Salwah.
“A person gets revenue from copyrighted work they have produced, so if someone else is making money from it, it becomes copywrong (copyright infringement),” she explains.
Salwah also adds that the reason copyright is given in the first place is to incentivise innovative work, like books, scripts, music, movies and musicals, which are in material form (can be seen or heard). Even material on websites and blogs can be copyright material.
Salwah says ultimately the best thing to do when reproducing a recipe or utilising a revised recipe inspired by someone else’s culinary efforts in any public domain is to give credit where it is due.
“When you think about it, it’s just about giving people due tribute and thanks, that’s the basic principle,” she says.
Which is why established cookbook authors like Datin Kalsom Taib, author of Johor Palate: Tanjung Puteri Recipes and Malaysia’s Culinary Heritage: The Best of Authentic Traditional Recipes, both of which have bagged awards at the prestigious Gourmand World Cookbook Awards – are fastidious about attributing credit and recognition to the people who share their recipes with her, regardless of whether the original person who shared the recipe has published their recipe or not.
“All the recipes in my books are courtesy of someone, because I am not a cook; I am a recipe collector. I think you have to do this, you cannot just say it is your recipe, you cannot take it and claim it as your own – I don’t think you can sleep well if you do that, and imagine the damage to your reputation and image!” she says.
Kalsom cites an example of a recipe she hunted down for her Johor Palate cookbook, as a model of why it is so important to attribute people for their work, especially if they have been generous enough to share a rare recipe.
“My grandmother used to make the best kuih kepal, which is a traditional kuih. We loved it so much when we were growing up, so when I was putting together Johor Palate, I thought ‘Where can I get this recipe?’ Nobody seemed to know, and many people had never even heard of it.
“I went around Johor looking for someone who could make it and I found a lady who made it. I went to see her and she was so generous. She said, ‘I will show you how to cook it and I will give you the ingredients.’ So that recipe is preserved in the book and I acknowledged her and said I got the recipe from her, and it made her so happy that I shared her recipe,” she says.
Kalsom also always asks for permission if she is reproducing a published recipe in its entirety. An upcoming book of hers for instance features two recipes from a cookbook entitled Favourite Recipes from the Tunku’s Kitchen, which highlights meals treasured by Malaysia’s first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj. To include the recipes in her book, Kalsom specifically asked Tunku’s daughter YTM Tunku Dato’ Paduka Tunku Khadijah Tunku Abdul Rahman for permission.
“To me, if you want to do a cookbook and take somebody’s recipes wholesale like that, you should ask for permission and acknowledge them. So when she agreed to my request, I mentioned in the cookbook that the recipes are courtesy of her,” says Kalsom.
Lim Boon Ping who runs the popular Cooking Ah Pa YouTube channel, where he shares all the meals he cooks at home, says he also believes that giving credit is the best thing to do.
“Most of my recipes are passed down from my grandmother and great-grandmother and I cook these dishes for my daily meals, which I then share on my YouTube channel.
“But if I know how I got a particular recipe, I will mention the source in my videos, because it is my habit to give credit to people. I will say I got the idea from a chef in Penang, etc. So I always give credit, I think it is a very good practice,” he says.
Yours or mine?
One thing that is constant in terms of recipes is how changeable they are. A traditional recipe that requires the pounding of ingredients with a pestle and mortar may give way to modern iterations where the ingredients are blended instead.
A recipe developed by someone who is garlic-averse can be altered to suit the palate of someone who adores garlic. There are so many permutations and iterations that can be formed out of a source recipe, so at which point does a recipe cease to become the original recipe provider’s and when does it become someone else’s? And when does recipe theft occur here?
According to Salwah, in the case of recipes published in cookbooks and other copyrighted material, “It is a bit qualitative in terms of assessment of what amounts to copyright infringement. For example, in a recipe for sugee cake, 90% of the recipe could be composed of basic ingredients but if you take 5% from someone else’s work and that 5% is what makes it special, it may cause you to be infringing,” she says.
Essentially, if the copied features involve the originality, labour and skill from the original creator, it is deemed as a copyright infringement.
Kalsom meanwhile believes that if a recipe has been changed in very small ways that make no tangible difference, the recipe still belongs to the original recipe creator, and so she duly credits them in her cookbooks.
“For me, when a recipe originates from a friend or relative, and they have used five tablespoons of oil and I doubled that, or I decided to add more garlic and onions, I will still acknowledge them, because these are just minor changes,” she says.
Food historian Ahmad Najib Ariffin, better known as Nadge, says what can be tricky is when a person is the first to publish a particular recipe that they learnt from an oral source.
In Malaysia, oral tradition is the primary way that many older Malaysians learnt how to cook, so this is a very legitimate method that people can use to attain a recipe.
“This is not very fair but in a way, the first person who publishes it – even though they may have gotten it from an oral source – it becomes their recipe.
“Ethically, they should acknowledge where they got it from. But if someone tries to say, ‘Oh, that is my recipe you are using’, how do you prove it? If the original recipe was published – as in the case of the Sharon Wee/Elizabeth Haigh case – it is clear-cut.
“But if someone taught a recipe to their friend by showing them how to cook it and that friend then published it without acknowledging them, it is very difficult to prove ownership of the recipe,” says Nadge.
Salwah says that in the case of a recipe that has been learnt through oral tradition, a person who first publishes it in a material form, earns the copyright.
“It’s a Western ideology, because most Eastern practices were oral, but it’s basically who got it in a material form first. But having said that, if the person who taught the recipe has written it down even in rough short hand, that in itself can be the subject of copyright, even if it hasn’t been published,” she says.
On the other hand, when recipes have substantially deviated from the source material and no longer resemble the original version, Kalsom says this is when she thinks a recipe can legitimately be called someone else’s.
“I have a friend who is married to a German and she makes a great chicken schnitzel. She got the original recipe from her mother-in-law, but she developed it and put more spices, like mustard, herbs and chilli paste and added different flours to make the chicken crispier. Essentially, she Malaysianised the chicken schnitzel. So whose recipe is that? I think it is her recipe because she has completely reformatted it.
“My friend shared her recipe in my cookbook, and I acknowledged it as her recipe, but I also wanted to be generous so I mentioned her mother-in-law. But I do think that when a recipe is substantially modified and altered to suit a different palate, it becomes your recipe,” says Kalsom.
Lim meanwhile doesn’t believe that recipes can be owned by anyone, since they typically pass down the generations and change constantly.
“It can be very hard to draw a clear line on who owns recipes and what is considered recipe theft. In my case, my recipes passed down from my grandmother and great-grandmother, so I don’t believe in copyright in recipes, because all the recipes have passed down from so many generations. If you tweak it slightly, is it your recipe? I don’t buy that. I think you can just call it your own way of cooking it.
“So for me, I don’t care if people copy or use my recipes, because they are not my own – they came from my grandmother and great-grandmother,” he says.
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