Not sharing recipes

[ThreeHousesNoHouse]

Aibu to find it annoying and childish when people don’t share recipes. As if it makes them special to be the only one who can make a dish.

Even giving a general direction is fair enough e.g. the chicken has paprika and cumin or ‘I put beetroot in the chocolate cake but it’s a family secret recipe so I won’t go into detail’ is fine.

My mil once told me the recipe for dh’s favourite stew she made ‘is somewhere on the internet maybe’ eyeroll.
At least own it and say ‘I want to be the only one able to make his favourite dish’.

It’s more weird when vague acquaintances won’t share. E.g. church bring and share, but won’t share the recipe.

If I make the cake at the next bring and share we will all know it’s Gladys’ recipe. If I make it at the school cake sale how will that affect Gladys?

@speakout, I think you're right! laughing at the coleman's being the secret ingredient. I had a colleague who moved to America and while we were chatting once she asked me to post her schwarts savoury mince seasoning. I said ''what, not chocolate?'' but she was very insistent.

It is a bit annoying when you ask for a recipe and your request is turned down, but...

We have local fete\ a couple of markets every year. I put a few bits in it and won a few prizes. I didn’t mind sharing the recipes till last Christmas until I saw the stall with baking that most of contents came from my recipes I had shared with the stall owner in previous years.

I don’t mind sharing my recipes for somebody’s enjoyment but I was very taken aback by making it commercial.

I have a Xmas dessert recipe. It's from a book and I make it more or less to recipe.
I do share the recipe but on the proviso that I retain the rights to bake it for Xmas/Special birthdays.

What harm will ever occur if someone shares a recipe? Maybe some people are worried that the other person will make more of a success of it, find better tweaks, have a magic touch. Or that they'll turn it into a million pound industry. 'Ooooh, I want to keep all the praise and glory for myself' I don't know - just seems so .... petty.

Sometimes I get a bit twitchy when someone asks for a recipe (doesn't happen that often!) because It looks nothing like the one I started out with. Like other posters, I've tweaked it, but not in a very methodical way and it's hard to describe the haphazard bunging in of ingredients which has evolved. But I do my best. It's wonderful when someone enjoys the food you make for them, so why not give them the chance to reproduce that experience? So what if you've perfected it over time? It's a lovely gift to someone to save them that trial and error and let them get straight to the good bit.

JellySlice

What a wonderful book and story. This is absolutely amazing for the community to have done that and such a wonderful gift for the generations to come. This sort of stories always reminds me that evil will never prevail even if sometimes Light and Good is very hard to see and feel. There is always hope.

I would absolutely live a copy of that book. I would treasure it. I live in Dublin.

I find being asked for the recipe a huge compliment. The only problem is well I might have used the recipe of BBC good food to start with I will have tweaked it along the way.

So the conversation tends to go well the base is from BBC good food bars I add X And I don’t add Y and then instead of a full spoonful of that I only use half a spoon and I double the amount of that.

Usually at this point their eyes start to glaze over.

ResistanceisFutile - Stovies! Pines! My mother's were amazing and I just don't have her touch for them.

basic recipe off the Internet which I've then tweaked and adapted and improved and perfected over quite a long time.

What I will do is tell people the original basic recipe I started with. It's then up to them to spend the time and effort in tweaking it until it's perfection.

We sometimes bake an internet recipe which we share in work or with a sports club etc. It's surprising the number of times we say which recipe it is and people say, "I've tried that one but mine always fall apart". So we tell them them what we did to make it work etc. E.g., Jamie Oliver's Ultimate Gingerbread. You really do have to press hard to get the topping to stick and score it while it's warm.

Arran I honestly dream about this lady's stovies. They were perfection and nobody else's even come close. It must be a good 25 years since I last had them but I still hanker after them even now!

I have some sausages in the freezer. I may defrost them and have another crack at it...

Why do people feel so entitled to a recipe over other things, just because it's not a solid object? You're not owed anything If someone for whatever reason doesn't fancy sharing then shrug and move on. Maybe it gives them pleasure to have a secret between themselves and another person and giving the recipe to whoever asked for it would entail a sacrifice of that pleasure.
For example I totally understand if a MIL is missing her son and likes that they have one tradition centred around a particular dish, and the only way she can think of to preserve the tradition is to be the only one who can make it.
Such a grabby thread

Oh this is a funny thread, I’m famed in my sons circle of friends for a killer chill and my chicken pie,
Why the mystery I don’t know, just use your taste buds and buy the best ingredients you can.
I have tho recited via mobile phone via my daughter to her best friend whilst driving. The chicken pie, for her to win the boyfriends heart, through the stomach as they say its worked they are now living together on London

@ResistanceIsNecessary
The secret ingredient will be something like a Tesco value can of spam

mumw I am intrigued now. What is your Xmas/birthday dessert? Give us a clue

They're just recipes. My MIL made the best pastry and casseroles I've ever tasted. It wasn't a secret, I just cant make them like her.
Yeah, I have this...DH and I love cooking and he especially is a really great cook. MIL makes incredible stews that we can never recreate and her coleslaw...!! I've never liked coleslaw before but hers is fantastic! She's told us what's in it...I've watched her make it so I know she's not leaving anything out but I just cannot make it taste like hers!!

My sister went to a friends house when she was young and had chicken pasta for tea. She raved about it for ages, so my mum asked said friends mum for recipe, it was pasta with a tin of chicken soup on it

For some people cooking is a creative process, which they spent a lot of time developing, why should they share it though? Someone mocked the idea of ‘intellectual property’ but it is in a way. I work in a creative field and developed some techniques and even my own ‘recipes’ for some materials to make my products. I encountered a similar attitude of BU for not sharing the result of a lot of research. However, it is very much at the core of my business. I very much respect the fact that someone might have a special recipe they want to keep. If it is that good and unique, someone might use it for their own commercial success. Look at the furore over the Reggae Reggae Sauce, where Mr ‘Roots’ claimed it as his family recipe and was eventually forced to pay out in a law suit because he ‘borrowed’ the recipe from a previous food stall, where he worked with someone else. Even if it isn’t a case of a lot of money being earned with it, some folk pass off the work of others for social acceptance. It smacks of entitlement to be expected to be handed the recipe that might be the culmination of someone else’s labour of love.

TemptressofWaikiki but most people's cooking is not done for commercial purposes, so you have nothing to protect from a financial point of view.
99.99% of recipes that people develop are not done with a point of money making.

dimsum what a miserable attitude

How sad

Slightly at a tangent but I would desperately like someone to show me how to make potica - there's something I'm obviously doing wrong not to get the texture right. It's still good, but from the photographs I see online, it's just not quite right inside (this might also be down to my fan oven where I can't turn the fan off).

just use your taste buds and buy the best ingredients you can

I used to be a 'by taste' and smell cook but since I sustained a couple of head injuries and then a bout of sinusitis, neither my sense of taste nor smell has returned in a useful manner. I have to lay all of the seasonings out and measure them out so I can see they've been used because I can no longer tell when something's been added. It's hugely irritating and very disruptive to how I cook/bake.

I’ve always been thrilled to be asked for my recipes.
My shepherd’s pie is made with tinned chopped tomatoes, a tin of Hienz tomato soup, couple of oxo cubes and a selection of whatever vegetables need using up. Celery and onions are however, compulsory (I loathe raw celery but it’s del in all stews, soups and casseroles, including my Grandma’s Scouse).
I love mashed potatoes with shit-tons of garlic butter, sour cream and finished off with ground pepper and chives.

Del=compulsory
Don’t know what happened there

I love the differences I see in recipes when sharing. I don't use tomatoes or tomato products in my shepherd's/cottage pies, for example.

I've only encountered this strange behaviour once, regarding some brownies at a party. The person who brought the (very nice) brownies refused to share the recipe, claiming it was a secret. Strange, as they would have been much more likely to have found the recipe online than to have labour-intensively developed it themselves from scratch through numerous painstaking iterations! What harm is there in telling others what not-so-secret-recipe-off-the-internet they used??

Therefore, I concluded it must have come from a box.

I don't have that many recipes handed down from my mum, but always cook steak and kidney pudding the way she did it, (it is the absolute best ever) and was extremely annoyed when Felicity Cloake (Grauniad cook) not only dissed our method in her 'the perfect...' column but also put carrots in her perfect S&K. FFS.

Carrots in S&K pudding? I've never come across that before, they shouldn't be there. Steak, kidney and gravy only.

I think insecure people won't share recipes.

I am surrounded by people who love to cook and we all happily share recipes, I feel flattered to see my friends cooking my family favourites and it is very special to me that my friends and their families enjoy my grandmothers dishes, she lives on through her fabulous recipes.

My dad has a secret recipe but it's secret because it's cheating! It's a dip and it's a packet soup mixed with Greek yogurt and he pretends it's some gourmet recipe.

I have just seen this.. Was it a packet of French Onion soup, by any chance?

I used to make a dip like this, it was Frnech Onion, and I got it from a magazine, I think, so long ago I can't really recall where from.

It's a recipe that works, and I never made a secret of what was in it. I guess it could be tweaked as I think the original recipe just called for natural yoghurt (it was the 80s/90s, greek yoghurt wasn't widely available).