Someone's in the kitchen with Foucault

New-to-me DC blogger Harmany Music wonders about receipts* and copyright. As I prepare to raise this very same question at my day job, and evidently unsuccessful  in my effort to delineate the difference between PR and journalism,  I welcome thoughts on how the concept of authorship applies to receipts. The category of the secret receipt, like Coke or Col. Sanders' eleven herbs and spices** seems worth considering, in that if receipts functioned entirely like copyrightable works, they would not ever need to be secret -- it would be absurd to, say, keep The Corrections secret, out of fear that it would be duplicated -- the whole point of authorship is to allow for copies to be produced, with the stipulation that you have the right to control the process. The end use of a receipt is different, in that it functions more like a printing press than like a book. One can produce an infinite number of, say Lobster Savannahs from one copy of the receipt, so in order to control the production of Lobster Savannahs, one must guard the ingredients, proportion, and process. However, and here is where it gets tricky, copying the receipt does not mean the same end product. Nobu could hand out its black cod with miso receipt in fortune cookies to every diner, but the vagaries of supply, technique and equipment would stack the odds against Nobu diners replicating this dish at home. A few thoughts to conclude:

1) Despite relatively pervasive awareness that much comes in what Pampille calls the coup de main, home cooks continue to fetishize receipts -- again, the best evidence of this comes in the persistence of the secret receipt, common to Coke and KFC, not to mention Mrs. So-and-so, who will not divulge her Oysters So-and-so receipt for the Junior League cookbook. An excellent example of this mentality comes in the Beastie Boys video for Body Movin', an hommage to Diabolik with a plot that revolves around the struggle over a Betty Crocker fondue receipt card -- in the last shot, we see the villain savoring the fondue he has prepared from the purloined receipt.

2) If it is not all about the receipt, what of the enduring popularity of chef/restaurateur cookbooks? Your food is not gonna taste like Mario's or Alice's but folks seem to like these books anyway.

3) Is anyone researching scribal publication in the context of cooking?

*That is to say, "recipe"; for reasons lost to posterity, and trouble spelling "recipe," the Gurgling Cod style guide specifies the older usage.
**Lest we forget, PETA wants you to know that KFC tortures chicks. <Image deleted due to teeming hordes of google fueled onanists with nothing better to wank to than some poor young woman in a yellow bikini outside a KFC. Like Billy Bragg says,  safe sex  doesn't mean no sex, it just means use your imagination. So keep your Noxema out of my bandwidth.>  Hard to pick a favorite here, though if you boil it down to making people fat, and  scalding chickens alive vs. causing activists to stand in snow in bikinis, I'll give the nod to the animal rights folks in this matchup. But speaking of the Beastie Boys, authorship, and PETA, what about this?

Comments

[Boston Jerk]

Antiquarian "receipts" published pre-1923 are of course in the public domain. For example, this 1796 receipt for Election Cake in Amelia Simmons's classic "American Cookery":

30 quarts flour
10 lbs butter
14 lbs sugar
12 lbs raisins
3 doz eggs
1 pint wine
1 quart brandy
4 oz cinnamon
4 oz fine colander seed
3 oz ground allspice

Wet flour with milk to the consistency of bread over night, adding one quart yeast; the next morning work the butter and sugar together for half an hour, which will render the cake much lighter and whiter; when it has rise, lightly work in every other ingredient except the plumbs, which work in when going into the oven.

Mmm, Election Cake...

Hope this helps.

[punisher]

I'd argue that the relationships between: author/chef - recipe - performer/chef - cooked food - diner,

is less like the relationships between: author - manuscript - printing press - book copy -reader,

and more like the relations between: playwrite (or composer) - script (or sheet music) - performer - theatrical work (or musical work) - audience.

The ontological differences would be relevant, though I don't have time at this moment to elaborate my thinking on this. I'll try to comment again later.

[Fesser]

Please do comment more--I think the play analogy works well -- Derek Jacobi's trout amandine will be better than mine -- and I'd be interested to hear more -- I had not thought of plays/performers because, as you know, I do not approve of the theater.

[punisher]

Nelson Goodman thought and wrote about some of the issues that you are raising. One relevant aspect is considered here, although he is discussing music performance and scores, rather than food and recipes:

All and only those performances that fully correspond to, or “comply with,” the score count as performances of the work. Even one small mistake on the part of the performer, say, in replacing one note for another, is sufficient to declare that, technically, a different work has been performed. On the other hand, other, important aspects of standard musical notation are not in a notational system: indications of tempo, for instance, as well as the convention of letting the performer choose the cadenza, give great latitude to the performer. Hence, in Goodman's view, while two performances that sound almost exactly alike may not be performances of the same work, radically differently sounding performances may be. Notice, however, how the question of identity is here sharply distinct from the question of value: “the most miserable performance without actual mistakes does count as [a genuine instance of a work], while the most brilliant performance with a single wrong note does not” (Goodman 1976, 186).

I'd recommend following the above link to see how Goodman describes "autographic" and "allographic" art forms.

[generic viagra]

hello friends, to be honest I really like the kitchen is one of my favorite subjects when I was in college made several university studies on culinary arts.

[childhood obesity statistics]

However, and here is where it gets tricky, copying the receipt does not mean the same end product.

[cigarette smoking fetish]

The ontological differences would be relevant, though I don't have time at this moment to elaborate my thinking on this.

[air jordan 1]

As fruit needs not only sunshine but cold nights and chilling showers to ripen it, so character needs not only joy but trial and difficulty to mellow it. Do you understand?