To think there is a MORAL OBLIGATION to share recipes if asked?

[AddToBasket]

Look, it's just a pickle recipe. Your daughter gave me a jar, it tasted delicious and I asked for the recipe when I'd finished the jar because we'd all fought over the last spoonful.

You live 200 miles away and you have refused to give out the recipe.

It's an outrage.

This reminds me of a party I was about to attend and other party goers were raving about the fabulous pasta bake the host was famous for.

Picture a greasy slop pile in a clear pyrex dish. Clear so we could see the wonder of the bake I imagine. It was some pasta and what ever veg was on special with a jar of value pasta sauce dumped over it. The fabulousness bit was the bag of cheddar dumped over the top.

The recipe couldn't be shared with us oh no but the evidence was all over the kitchen so no csi team required to piece it together. It tasted like old dish water.

Oh feel free to use the recipe

i like it DB but i love celeriac

I do like celeriac, especially mashed. Now thinking of a reason to make tartiflette..

Nothing worse than having expectations raised then realising you're sitting in a group of people with no tastebuds. Nothing wrong with a bit of sexed-up pasta sauce, maybe just needed a bit more salt?

God, I used to do loads of cooking but now I've become a bit lazy as MB is much more efficient in the kitchen.

Reminds me of a nasty bit of work who was a friend of my nasty bit of work ex husband (the one who was shagging my 'best friend'). Friend made his own ginger beer, which apparently required a 'starter' something or other. He not only refused to pass on a bit of 'starter' so H could make his own ginger beer, but wouldn't pass on recipe either.

My shepherd's pie is famous in the family and with friends. I gladly pass on its, and any recipes for that matter. Reminds me - someone has put me onto a fabulous range of sauces - 'Stoke's'. Their brown sauce, tomato sauce and pickles are wonderful. Even my hyper-critical, 'don't like trying anything new' grandkids are converted.

Moral obligation?

Does no-one else find that an extremely strange way of thinking about recipes? Unless you're all Vicars and are talking about feeding hordes of starving people on very few resources? No?

Then morality has nothing to do with it.

Get over yourself, op, to use your own phrase against you. It's only chutney.

cantabile did you not read that as hyperbole for the purposes of an entertaining thread?

I saw it as a thread started for amusement, Cantabile. People with no sense of humour need not join in.

unless you make your living writing recipe books and it's a case of "buy a copy of the book"

My friend had a clear out and gave me two books which are about 50 years old. One is Italian Regional Cookery by Ada Boni and the other is Good French Cooking by Mapie, Comtesse Guy de Toulouse-Lautrec.

They have thousands of recipes in them. The Italian ones in particular turn up in lots of books, yes, I'm looking at you Jamie Oliver.

These are traditional recipes, so no one owns the copyright on the idea, but you'd think he could squeeze in a slice of humble pie with all the other food he shoves in his gob.

I'd say there is a moral obligation to at least consider the happiness of others. It's about Pareto efficiency - if you can improve someone's happiness at no cost to yourself or anyone else, it makes the world a better place.

I suppose the main counter-argument is that knowing you have exclusivity gives you pleasure which you don't want to give up. But two problems with this: that surely can't give you more pleasure than the recipe would give others; it is sociopathic and you'd actually be happier in the long run if you weaned yourself off such behaviour.

Other factors to weigh, which will often outweigh all else:

1. if you promised a friend to keep it secret: dishonouring a promise would cause unhappiness, though the arguments above of course apply to them;
2. if it is a 'family recipe': family makes us happy, and anything that strengthens that even a tiny bit counts for a lot.

MrsBethel I would say that your point 2) elides and conflates a multitude of sins that might perhaps cause a great deal of unhappiness in the long term

I disagree with your basic premise that 'family makes us happy', MrsB.

I always liked the way Nigella tries her best to credit the original source (even if she has changed the recipe beyond all recognition) in her books. BUT again, I wouldn't mind so much if I was not credited.

I agree that just as fashion designers trawl charity shops and collections of clothing (Decades is one) for 'inspiration' (aka copying), so do some recipe 'authors' trawl old foodbooks that are little known.

I think people who 'share' recipes but withhold vital steps or an ingredient are being moral cowards.

I had a few cookbooks like that in the 70s, which was an absolute disgrace. Anything from them I was intending to cook would have to be checked with my mum first. There was one recipe for some chicken dish, where I was left obssessively going over it trying to find when and what I was meant to do with the chicken, as I had not had to touch it yet, and here I was at the end - the very end - of the recipe.

I think it is interesting when a recipe has a very specific name like "shepherd's pie" or "chicken cacciatore" that a person can possibly claim it is "their" recipe - whether they are your grandma, or Jamie Oliver.

If you call it Jamie Oliver's "Fat Tongue" Pie, or Chicken in a Special Tomato Sauce, then yes it can be "your" recipe. you might genuinely have made it up. But if your granny is laying one finger alongside her nose and smirking knowingly about "her" special recipe for Pavlova, or something else with an actual name, then it's just a tweak (if that) to an existing Thing. And then you get into the whole Is It Canon thing? Some people say that if you add a single other ingredient then it is no longer the thing. So either it is your special recipe and you have to call it Farty Barty Cake, or it is anyone's and you can call it the thing that everyone knows.

I am deliberately vague and "forgetful" when people ask for recipes.

Vezzie

Oh go on...you've sold me on the Olive Fat Tongue Pie...mmm yum.

I have 'our' own recipe for boiled fruit cake BUT it is a bastardisation of about twenty recipes that came before. Where the 'own' bit starts I do not know.

Really gentlehoney? Really?

This is .... tragic.

There is a sort of weird insecurity about one's own value and position that lies behind all this (the weirdness that I think lies behind all the odd MIL behaviour that I read about on here - it's a very gendered thing)

If I go to all the trouble of researching / choosing / adapting a recipe, buying ingredients, putting time aside to cook, getting my children out of the way or harmlessly involved, and getting a good result; then making arrangements to transport the dish in one piece, or making the much more complicated arrangements of hosting people nicely.... if I do ALL THAT I trust and totally believe that people will eat the thing I made and be really bloody grateful and there is NOTHING AT ALL to be lost in people knowing exactly how I did it!

this is weird

There is nothing new under the sun

I don't get why you wouldn't share a recipe just because somebody else can make a great pickle or pavlova shouldn't take away from the fact that you yourself are a damn good cook

Think about the great chefs like Michel Roux, Pierre Koffman and Adria Ferreria who have gone on to train the next generation of Michelin starred chefs. People still know them as culinary giants, they are not forgotten just because somebody else could recreate and emulate their dishes

It is sometimes hard to tell someone a recipe though, even if it is an adaptation/bastardisation of something from a cookbook. I learned to cook from cookbooks (my Mum was/still is absolutely hopeless in the kitchen, she hated cooking). But I've adapted all the recipes from my cookbooks over the years, according to my/our taste. If someone asks me for a recipe, I have to really think to write it down, as it often is: half a pound of this, a pinch of that, handful of such-and-such, a sprig of something else.

My Mum's bread pudding was hers (it was one of the few things she did really well). That's not entirely fair - she often did homemade pies and cakes and things, but she did breathe a huge sigh of relief when Vesta curries and other packet meals came onto the market

I've never had a bread pudding that even came close to hers. So although bread pudding as such is nationally known, her recipe for it was hers, and I can't find anything online that remotely resembles it. So when people say "My recipe for something", they are probably quite justified, as they've tweaked it according to their taste.

DaddyBeer - thanks v much for the link to the 8 Curries - will definitely try the Butter Chicken. Made one recently from a book by "The Spice Sisters". It was okay, but not great. Looked at Rick Stein's, but yours seems a bit easier

Vezzie, I freely admit it is a bit weird, but there are two reasons.
The first is that a special family recipe handed down for over a hundred years is not special if every Tom Dick and Harry knows it.
And the second reason is that if regular guests can make it exactly the same at home I will have nothing "nice" to feed them with when they come to stay.

My grandmother, mother, sister, my daughter and myself all make the 'same' Mexican Chicken recipe. It tastes differently every time each one of us makes it.

No recipe is ever totally replicated, even that 'special' one.

I've been asked for recipes before when I really and truly didn't use one for the dish.

I find questions like "how long do you cook it for" very difficult to answer. My answer would be "til it's ready". Not trying to be difficult, but really I don't know because I've never thought about it!

Baking is a different matter though. I need a recipe and I need to follow it exactly otherwise there will be a disaster. But I've never kept any baking recipe secret - they are not mine to keep secret!

What a shame gentlehoney. I think so much more of my friends that would share something like that, and more of their hospitality to be honest!