Recipes from the Tudor Kitchen - The Author Responds

[This is an update to my earlier posts about this book]

This morning I received an update from the publisher which included a somewhat gracious "mea culpa" from Mr. Breverton.

In it he stated that the error was on his part and not the publishers. Because of personal issues and a rush to meet a publishing deadline, the attributions for the recipes were inadvertently left out of the file that he sent out, that there was no intention of plagiarism, and that the book will be corrected to indicate where the recipes all came from.

All of that is fine for the issue of plagiarism, and I'm glad to hear that he is correcting the omissions. However it still does not address the issue of copyright infringement. I have asked whether he will be seeking permission from the authors of the recipes for their use, or if he will be completely rewriting the recipes to make them his own work.

Recipes from the Tudor Kitchen - Scavenger Hunt!

[This is an update to my earlier posts about this book]

First off, I'd like to thank everyone for being so supportive during this mess. It makes things so much easier to deal with. THANK YOU ALL!

I've taken the time to go through the recipes in the book and list the title, source, first few ingredients, and when possible where the recipe was copied from. I've compiled this into a spreadsheet that can be downloaded from the website. I've only managed to get through the first 136 recipes so far and will be adding to it as time allows.  [Update: the file now contains all 283 recipes]

So far what I've found is that the recipes were culled from a wide range of websites. The greatest number so far are from my own, but that's probably due to the fact that I can spot my own recipes much easier than someone else's. Here are the numbers:

19 - http://medievalcookery.com/
6 - http://www.godecookery.com/
4 - http://greneboke.com/
3 - http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl
2 - http://www.florilegium.org/
1 - http://www.hrp.org.uk/

If you happen to identify where any of the remaining recipes came from, let me know and I'll update the spreadsheet. Note that a preview version of the book is available online at Google books. Not all the content is there, but enough of the recipes are to be useful.

Recipes from the Tudor Kitchen - Update 2

[This is an update to my earlier posts about this book]

Amazon.com was reasonably quick in responding and removing the book (both print and ebook) from their website. For those who also have recipes online which may have been copied, I will be posting a list of the recipes that Breverton included. At this point it seems to be a bit of a moot point as the book is no longer available through the largest of distributor, but I am quite curious as to exactly how much of the content was non-original.

More interestingly, I received an email this morning from the publisher, Amberley Publishing. It was politely worded and essentially said the following:

1. They have worked with Mr. Breverton for a long time and think it would be very unlikely for him to have copied the material without permission.

2. They are waiting to hear from Mr. Breverton as to where the material came from, or at least let them know it was an accident. 

3. Because of the contracts they use, it's the author's responsibility to clear permissions for all content. 

4. They think Mr. Breverton should discuss the matter directly with me and leave them out of it.

5. They will get back to me shortly.

This is about what I expected, though it would have been nice if they pulled the title from their own catalog as well.

More as things go.

(Stolen?) Recipes from the Tudor Kitchen

A friend posted a link to a review for a cookbook of Tudor recipes that I hadn't seen yet, so I was understandably excited to check it out. Then I found something disturbing. The review included some recipes from the cookbook ... and two of them were mine.

I was not asked for permission to use the recipes, and from what I can tell no credit was given, so I sent off a quick note to the publisher to see what's what and what can be done.

But of course my mind couldn't leave it alone. The review included eleven recipes, and it seemed unlikely that a random selection of eleven recipes from a cookbook would just happen to include the two that were taken from my website .... unless of course more than just those two were copied from elsewhere on the internet, and I only recognized the fact because I wrote them.  So I took another look.

The following recipes are listed in the review:

Salmon Sallet for fish days
Roast capon (Spice roast chicken)
Salmon Rostyd in sauce (Grilled salmon in wine sauce)
To fry whitings (Fried whitefish in apple or onion sauce)
Steamed asparagus spears in orange sauce
Compost (Cold spiced vegetables in wine and honey sauce)
Sweet potatoes in rose and orange syrup
Egges in moneshyne
Tostee (Ginger syrup toasties)
A dysschefull of snowe (Apple puree in snow)
Smartard (Sweet cottage cheese fritters)

There's also another review that includes just two recipes:

A Dysschefull of Snowe – Strawberries on Snow
Steamed Asparagus Spears in Orange Sauce

This makes for 12 different recipes (the steamed asparagus shows up in both reviews).

The first thing I noticed is that they seem to be an odd mix of US and UK measurements. The author is from Wales, and in the intro of his book (available in preview on Amazon.com) he says he did this because the over-sixty crowd is "more acquainted" with the US (non-metric) measures. Huh. I could understand having them all one way or the other, but a mix of the two seems odd.

I started to do some web searches, and it looks like MedievalCookery.com isn't the only place recipes were taken from.

Salmon Sallet for fish days - [Shakespeare's Kitchen by Francine Segan]
Compost (Cold spiced vegetables in wine and honey sauce)  -  [MedievalCookery.com]
Tostee (Ginger syrup toasties) - [MedievalCookery.com]
Smartard (Sweet cottage cheese fritters) - [The Foody UK and Ireland]
A Dysschefull of Snowe – Strawberries on Snow - [MedievalCookery.com]

Some of the recipes have edits, possibly in an attempt to disguise their origins or circumvent copyright law, or possibly because an editor didn't like the original wording, but in each case the source of the recipe is still quite clear.

This means that of the dozen recipes from the book that were featured in interviews, almost half can be found online with a quick search. This is not good.