Jessica Seinfeld’s new cookbook is a nationwide best seller, and her appearance earlier this month on the Oprah Winfrey show certainly helped. Her book, Deceptively Delicious, is a fantastic idea that incorporates hiding vegetables in foods such as cookies, cakes, and brownies. There is even a recipe that hides butternut squash in macaroni and cheese. As the parent of a picky eater myself, I find the concept ingenious as well as invaluable. In fact, as a thank you to Oprah Winfrey for the success that the book has received since Jessica’s appearing on the show, Jessica Seinfeld sent Oprah 21 pairs of designer shoes that totaled $18,000 and a note that said, “There are no words.”
It is an interesting way for a writer to express his or her gratitude, isn’t it? “There are no words.” Maybe that is because Jessica Seinfeld didn’t have the words to write her book to begin with.
Accusations of plagiarism are unfolding as parallels between another writer’s cookbook seem to be a bit more than coincidental. The similarities between Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious and Missy Chase Lapine’s, “The Sneaky Chef” are not only obvious, they are being commented on popular sites such as Amazon.com and Oprah.com.
Another slice of this story that is interesting is the fact that Missy Lapine had submitted her manuscript to Harper Collins twice in 2006 only to have her book rejected. Several months later, Collins published Jessica Seinfeld’s book. The same month, Missy Lapine’s book was signed to publication with Running Press.
The most interesting aspect of this story, I believe rests with copyright law itself. In fact, recipes may not be copyrighted. There are only specific ways to create a recipe and a recipe by itself is considered a scientific formula. However, the unique expression of a recipe may be copyrighted. Therefore, the fact that both Jessica Seinfeld and Missy Lapine have recipes that include spinach in brownies is not subject to copyright. If you are making spinach brownies, you can argue that there is one basic recipe for creating the treats, if you want to call them such. However, if the wordings that express the recipes are identical, then there is a good case for plagiarism. I noticed two paragraphs from both author’s books that look surprisingly similar.
Here is an excerpt from Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious:
“While I was cooking dinner, pureeing butternut squash for the baby and making mac and cheese for the rest of us, I had the crazy idea of stirring a little of the puree into the macaroni. … The colors matched -you couldn’t really see the squash in there -and the texture was perfect.”
Here is an excerpt from Lapine’s The Sneaky Cook:
“If you want to hide something in macaroni and cheese, you have to match the color of the dish. You could easily introduce white bean puree in the mac and cheese.”
It will be interesting to see if a suit is filed. These two paragraphs are alarmingly similar, and not in the recipe content, but in the expression of the text. It would be more plausible to have similarities in the recipes, which aren’t under copyright law, then to have two similar scenarios describing matching colors with macaroni and cheese.
Many people also find it difficult to believe that a woman who sends an $18,000 thank you gift of shoes because she has difficulty finding the words to write a thank you note could come up with the words to write her own book. Likewise, many also find it surprising that a woman accustomed to sending extravagant thank you shoes that total nearly $20,000 makes her own baby food and feeds Jerry Seinfeld macaroni and cheese for dinner.
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TWO books which are:
both cookbooks
shown to the same publisher
in the same year
with the same UNIQUE recipes
on the same UNIQUE cooking concept
by authors who live in the same city
with nearly IDENTICAL book covers
both pitched to OPRAH
IS JUST A COINCIDENCE. No way, I smell a rat!
Comment by Lucy — October 25, 2007 @ 12:52 am