Food For Thought: Who Owns a Recipe?

Innovation, but credit where it's due

Mochiko and I don’t get along too well.  Mochiko, also known as glutinous rice flour or sweet rice flour, is a common ingredient in Asian-style baked goods, some of which include the extremely Instagramable and virally-trendy mochi donuts. 

I tried to make mochi donuts a few months ago and ended up making a cement-like batch of dough that I stared at with hatred until I launched it into the compost.  I blame the recipe, but I suspect it may have been, ahem, user error.  My second attempt was with these Hawaiian butter mochi muffins that, while incredibly delicious, caved in (are they supposed to do that?) while cooling.

Clearly I have a lot to learn.

But I wonder though if there is a trademark officer that may also have a lot to learn about mochi. A discussion recently erupted on the Facebook group Subtle Asian Baking when bakery owners who sell mochi muffins started receiving “cease and desist” letters. Third Culture Bakery, a San Francisco Bay-area company that helped popularize mochi baked goods, trademarked “mochi muffins” and has deployed lawyers to enforce it. Small bakeries are not impressed and are suiting up to defend themselves and discussing whether they can get the trademark invalidated.

While I am reluctant to comment too much on the legalities of this situation, being neither a lawyer nor legal professional of any kind, I am inclined to agree with the defendants on this one: the term “mochi muffin” is purely descriptive and trademarking it would be rather like trademarking “banana muffin” or “white bread”. I think it’s likely that the person who approved the trademark is probably not that familiar with Asian baking.

It got me thinking. Who really owns a recipe?

Like I said above, I’m not a lawyer and don’t know the subtleties of the law where you live so I won’t get into the commercial or industrial application of such law. But I’m guessing that most of the recipes you make you read in a book, online, or someone taught you. At what point can you feel comfortable calling them your own? Here are some things to consider:

The list of ingredients (and even the quantity) is not the recipe. If you compare several recipes for blueberry muffins, for example, you’ll quickly note that they are very similar. One may add a streusel topping and another a sprinkle of sugar. Another may have a little cinnamon and yet another a bit of lemon zest. But a muffin is a muffin and even the quantities aren’t really all that different because a muffin batter is a ratio.

Use your own words. The way you describe the methodology and technique is important. A word-for-word duplication is obviously unethical, but it’s still plagiarism if you stick too close to another cook’s text. This is why so many cookbooks include a great deal more that recipes. While ingredients and quantities themselves are hard to copyright narrative and photos are a no-brainer. But once you’ve made a dish a few times you should be able to write out the techniques and steps in your own words based on how you actually make it in your own kitchen.

Get inspired and adapt. The phrases “Inspired by” and “Adapted from” are your best friends. If you’ve changed things around a bit and substituted chopped strawberries for the blueberries and added a little orange zest and a tablespoon of poppyseeds you’ve got yourself a new recipe, inspired by the original. If you’ve always roasted your chicken at 450F instead of 400F and you find your way works better, you’ve got an “adapted from”. If you’ve made something a million times and rarely look at the recipe, go back and read it. I’ll bet you’ve changed it more than you realize.

Give credit where it’s due. I’ve written before that cookbooks and recipes may be first and foremost about food, but they are also the stories of people and their authentic experiences. Whether in commercially-produced cookbooks and magazines, in community-based books, or on recipe cards passed from one family member to the next, the recipes tell stories of scarcity and prosperity, of tradition and innovation, and of changing times and cultural evolution. Make the story of the recipe’s origins part of what you share, even if it’s only how it got into your hands.

And let’s be really blunt here: Cooking hasn’t always been taken seriously. Like much other labour of day-to-day human existence it was long considered “women’s work” or work for other marginalized people and not treated as having economic value. But when something suddenly has economic value things sure change! When something becomes fashionable there’s a pretty good chance that the person or company that made it popular got the idea from somewhere, but had the advantage of resources or a platform that someone else didn’t. While it’s impossible to determine the true origins of everything, do take the time to dig a bit deeper than the obvious and popular sources when you’re thinking about innovating - the details you find can be a helpful guide.

When it comes to mochi muffins I’ll give credit where it’s due. The Subtle Asian Baking Facebook group piqued my interest, which led to me searching Pinterest, which led me to Drive Me Hungry’s Chewy Hawaiian Butter Mochi recipe. I clearly have a lot to learn about mochi and I certainly can’t call what I made a muffin, but they are INSANELY delicious and now I’m hungry to learn more. I may have to adapt a bit but I’m already inspired, so along the way I might eventually create my own recipe.