Delicious plagiarism

Sometimes larceny is more comical than outrageous:

This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentiis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network's site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain's campaign site.

On a section of McCain's site called "Cindy's Recipes," you can find seven recipes attributed to Cindy McCain, each with the heading "McCain Family Recipe." Ms. Handel quickly realized that some of the "McCain Family Recipes," were in fact, word-for-word copies of recipes on the Food Network site.

(The campaign has already yanked down the recipe pages.)

I couldn't care less about the people and the politics involved, but I thought it would be instructive to see what the campaign changed when they ripped off the recipes. It wasn't much -- a straight cut-and-paste job -- but there were a couple of differences.

The McCain treasured family recipe for "Farfalle Pasta with Turkey Sausage, Peas, and Mushrooms", for instance, is identical to Giada DeLaurentiis' for "Farfalle with Turkey Sausage, Peas and Mushrooms" -- except for two changes, the first of which is in the title (I suppose the campaign worker found 'farfalle' to be too esoteric and modified it with 'pasta'). But the big change came in the cheese:

DeLaurentis: "1/2 cup freshly grated Grana Padano cheese"

McCain: "1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese"

Was Parmesan somehow more "all-American" than Grana Padano? If so, why would you go for farfalle in the first place when Paula Deen alone has half-a-dozen recipes for macaroni and cheese?

My mom has an index-card box full of treasured family recipes, but they involve Thanksgiving casseroles and fruit pies, not "Ahi Tuna with Napa Cabbage Salad" or "Passion Fruit Mousse" -- a preparation that requires not only kiwis, but a blowtorch.

Are kiwis and a blowtorch part of anyone's treasured family recipes? My family's secret ingredients were more along the lines of Hidden Valley Ranch powder and a can of Durkee's french-fried onions.

And if a campaign worker was straining for the common, woman-of-the-people touch, why muck around with Santa Barbara cuisine when it would be just as easy to rip off Paula Deen's Hobo Hamburgers or Sandra Lee's Fountain Dogs?

Comments

[Jil]

Maybe the family cook gets the Food Network...what I find even more ridiculous is that a campaign site even includes recipes.

Reminds me of many years ago when a friend who worked as a teacher asked if I'd type up the recipe book she'd collected. Each elementary school student was asked to bring in the recipe for his or her favorite dish. Most were mac-and-cheese, cinnamon toast, hamburgers and so on. But one mother -- with a very creatively-named child -- sent steak tips in red wine and heavy cream sauce. Ooookay...

[Kevin]

That's hilarious!

And I agree with you about the campaign. I found a piece in the New York Sun where Cindy McCain shared one of "her" recipes, along with Michelle Obama's cobbler and...Hillary Clinton's chocolate-chip cookies. What's wrong with THAT picture?

[Chris]

Oh man, I agree they should have at least plagerized Paula Deen, but maybe that was too close to Howard Dean, there goes the southern cookin' with way too much butter vote!

[Nan]

Forget Paula Deen. Even better, if you want that down-home touch, would be to lift a few of the classics from The White Trash Cookbook: Grand Canyon Cake, for example. Nothing says home cooking like lots of food coloring and a generous soaking with cheap whiskey (for the uninitiated, it's a multiple layer cake with each layer of cake and frosting a different color. The cake is ripped in half to form the canyon, and the booze poured in).