Before we go any further, let's talk for a moment about copyright.

Cookbook authors are probably the most heavily plagiarized of all writers, and I wish strongly not to contribute to their troubles.

On the other hand, I can't write about cookbooks without using real cookbooks; I couldn't possibly come up with as many kinds of imaginary cookbooks as exist in real life. Therefore in this book I reproduce whole recipes from hundreds of cookbooks. Is such reproduction a violation of copyright?

I think not.

Copyright in the United States specifically allows for "fair use": reproduction for review or scholarly purpose. I'm not reproducing a recipe for somebody to go out and cook; I'm talking about its properties -- its merits and its problems. A book about recipes has got to be able to reproduce recipes. It's not fair to ask the reader of my book to buy or borrow every single book to which I refer (although I trust readers will be inspired to buy many of them).

I have made two rules for myself:

1. One complete recipe and only one from any one cookbook.

2. Complete recipes only from cookbooks I respect.

I like cookbooks. Now and then I find one that I'd prefer to pulp, but the world of cooking is both wide and deep, and there's room for many, many cookbooks, many more, even, than we have already.

So if I reproduce a whole recipe from a cookbook you can safely consider such reproduction an endorsement. In the context of the reproduction, I may be saying bad things about that particular recipe, I may make fun of the author, I may pour scorn on the publisher, but taken as a whole the cookbook has something to recommend it. There is some audience for which it would be appropriate, useful, and enjoyable.

Appendix A lists all the cookbooks from which I've reproduced whole recipes and explains what I like about each book. None of those cookbooks is perfect. How could anything as extensive and complicated as a cookbook ever be perfect? But I like every last one of them for one reason or another, and I'm happy to tell you why.

The rest of the website has different rules. We do not reproduce whole recipes on the nonbook sections of the website, we analyze them and present our analysis, and we do sometimes review books that we simply don't like at all.

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It is not possible to copyright an idea; copyright has to do with the form of words in which an idea is expressed. If you want to give a friend a recipe, don't photocopy it, don't copy it out by hand. Rewrite it in your own words. Draw your own pictures. Take your own photographs. And be sure to credit the author of the original recipe.