How 'original' can a recipe be?

[JD]

I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering this: how original does a recipe have to be for it to be classed as original? Are there many people who can claim to have 'invented' a recipe from scratch? I'm asking because I have a recipe I'm considering submitting, but it's one that I've adapted from another and not one I came up with myself from scratch. Any thoughts people?

Thanks.

Jane

[Ed]

This is tricky because lots of recipes exist, and many are very similar to each other. I understand this, but the content of the articles must still be unique. There are plenty of ways to make a recipe (and the article containing the recipe) original. Any close paraphrasing of a published recipe will likely be rejected, even if it's one that has been dug up from an ancient stack of recipes gotten from Grandma.

Jane, an adaptation should be okay. Just tread carefully and make sure that the change is not simply one ingredient substituted for another.

Thanks,
Ed

[JD]

Thanks for your reply, Ed. I'm not that bothered about getting this article in. I will think on it and see what I can come up with.

Cheers

Jane

[Lysis]

I got lucky because my sis just yesterday explained to me how to make some healthy fish, so I called her up and asked if I could pass along her awesomeness. It's kinda funny, but I think this assignment is easier for us single, non-cooking people who makeup stuff that takes little time and doesn't make us fat. LOL For me, if it has more than 3 ingredients (and yeah that includes salt and pepper), it's just way too much hassle. LOL

[JKALLEN]

Did this request for recipes get removed? I can't find it any longer in the public request list...

Jenn

[Ed]

There were a lot of submissions for this request. It was closed earlier today.

[cbhrbooth]

I noticed a few minutes ago that this request was closed, but I went ahead and submitted my article since it was written. All of my recipes came from my own baking notebooks which were basically cobbled together after a lot of trial and error. (Emphasis on error.) :) So. . . how do you measure (heh) originality within recipes? I used to know this when I regularly submitted recipes to kid-friendly cooking magazines, but I'm totally blank right now.
Mary B.

[Lor]

I had a feeling that request was too good to be true. It's too bad, but I've learned here that most things do sell eventually and food-related articles do have a market here. Did the requester purchase any at all?

[Lysis]

Methinks if'n you submitted an article for that job, you might want to setup google alerts on the text. If he purchased anything, it would have been in the "Recently Sold" list. I setup google alerts on mine, so far nothing has come up.

[Celeste Stewart]

The customer may have closed the request because he has enough submissions to review right now. He may also have found another source elsewhere or lost funding for the project. Who knows? While it's smart to watch all of our articles for plagiarism and theft, let's not assume that because a customer has pulled a request without purchasing any articles that he is probably stealing it.

[Ed]

Celeste is right. If you were a customer and you had an unprecedented response to your article request, you would probably close it to give yourself time to review the articles submitted. This is likely what happened in this case, as has happened in other cases.

Thanks,
Ed

[Lor]

Yea, I doubt it was theft. Never even considered it. There could be any number of reasons why it was pulled.

[Lysis]

hehe, I knew I'd get jumped on. I was a provider on Elance for a long time, so my radar is always on. It's pretty common on Elance for buyers to ask for free samples just to close the job and steal the content. It's why Elance has a "no free samples" policy in their TOS, but buyers still do it. That place has made me uber paranoid, so yeah, it's probably nothing but a desire to shut off the influx.