Recipe Writing and Recreating

I love cooking and creating new recipes. At Suite101 I have included several recipes for traditional, holiday and party cooking. When the opportunity presented itself to recreate 30 recipes for a print edition holiday cookbook, I jumped at the opportunity. But this was a whole new writing experience!

The pay method was fairly simple. I would retain full writer and creator credit for the recipes. I would be paid a decent sum for my contributions, half at the time of contract acceptance and the other half upon completion, along with royalties on book sales. I read the contract thoroughly and then handed a copy over to a friend of mine (who happens to be an attorney) to examine. Everything was legit so I signed it and got to work. This is the only part of the entire experience that went smoothly.

When it came to the actual recipes, I was told I had total creative powers to choose and recreate thirty popular American holiday dishes. There were only three rules to follow: the recipes must be entirely my own adaptation and never previously printed anywhere, each recipe should use inexpensive, every day ingredients to make affordable holiday dishes and and each recipe must include 3 unique ingredients that people wouldn't normally use but that wouldn't alter the traditional flavor. Here is the method I used to create the recipes:

1-Selected the thirty popular dishes I wanted to recreate, mostly southern favorites since I am a Georgia girl!

2-Wrote down my normal method of preparing the dishes.

3-Played around with each recipe, changing the ingredients, adding more flavors, etc.


4-Researched each recipe individually to look at the many variations to make sure my take on each recipe was entirely unique.

These four steps work well for anyone wanting to change a traditional, common or popular recipe into their own creation and publish it online. Most of my online published recipes earn quite well each month!

Except the client had a problem with every single recipe I submitted. I would modify the recipes to fit what he was asking only to have him once again find a problem. After many, many edits, he finally sent an email that basically said, "I hired you to write 30 recipes and you seem unable to complete the task. I do not have time to find someone else; Please go to any of these popular recipe sites and copy the recipes verbatim." He also included a list of dishes and upon swimming a little further into the online recipe pool, I noticed these specific dishes were identified as some of the most popular recipes online.

WHAT??? That 'method' is stealing and not only completely against what I believe is wrong but nothing like the job description I received. I hate when someone plagiarizes my work; why would I do it to anyone else?

I emailed him back, explaining all of this in great detail. In the end, he admitted that he never had any intention of accepting any variations of the recipes except those that were exact replicas of the popular recipes he had requested. Pretty much, he just wanted MY name attached to the stolen recipes, to clear him of being liable for copyright concerns.

Thanks to my lawyer friend, I was able to get out of this contract entirely and have the client sign a legal waiver stating he would not use my recipes or my name.

Another writing lesson learned! I'll write recipes for myself from now on. After all, I make a decent passive income off my published recipes that continues to pay long after the initial publishing instead of a one time payment anyways!