(tokyo break) let's talk recipe piracy.

I've got more photo's and thoughts to share on tokyo, but for now, let's talk about the bleeding edge of piracy. recipe piracy!

I decided when I set out for japan that dragging 200 books in my suitcase would be really unwise. So I dropped my cookbooks and brought along 194 books. It turned out to be a pretty good decision, since every recipe from every book ever seems to be on the internet.

case in point, I parted with a cookbook with a title like "world's greatest vegetarian recipes" or some such nonsense. The recipe I was really sad to part with was "kitchiri", a buttery, oily lentil and basmati pilaf. Well, one idle moment, I thought I'd check the internet, and lo and behold there's my kitchiri! Every ingredient, every proportion exactly the same as in the world's greatest veggie cookbook (I remembered most of the recipe, and several of the proportions owing to the difficulty of keeping it all in the kitchen).
Having had luck there, I searched another of my recipes, and ding ding ding! lentil bolognese, just as god intended. In fact, that link is the one I replaced my old link with when it went down. 20 more copies of the recipe could be pulled from the net, and I'd still be able to find it and a zillion other copies. I like this internet thing.

In truth, I know this isn't cutting edge. people have been lifting recipe's from other sources for ages. Slight differences in the language between the internet and book kitchiri recipe lead me to believe that there was some mitigation there as well. With indian recipes in particular, the spice proportions are so crucial, that I think many of the recipes have floated around unchanged for scores if not hundreds of years.
I'd wager that recipe piracy was actually one of the first forms of piracy, seeing as a unique and uniquely delicious recipe is made valuable only by it's scarcity. There's lots of lore out there about people desperately trying to steal their competitor's recipes...from old times and new.

There's something extra cool about cribbed recipes though. It's got that feeling of pirating something material and not just ones and zeros.

ps if you've run out of garlic, don't make the lentil bolognese without. ick.