Cooking

Ever since my bachelor days I’ve been a fan of Indian curries made at home for dinner. Back then, it was not unknown for me to eat tikka masala, vindaloo, or korma four or five times a week.

I’d picked up the habit after a series of priests from India had come for several summers and stayed in the rectory where I lived. At least a few were cooks and they introduced me to their native cuisine.

Now when I make curry it’s rarely from scratch but it’s also never straight from a box or jar. I use commercial curry paste but add other ingredients as well. And I almost never make it exactly the same way twice.

Lately I’ve been adding curry powder at the simmer stage. In order to boost that flavor. At the end I always add the traditional garam masala, which boosts the flavor depth. And tonight I grated a chunk of ginger and added with onions to sauté.

I love curry, as you might guess. Melanie claims I’m addicted. All I know is that on nights when I make it, the leftovers begin to call to me about 9pm and I can’t resist.

But who can blame me? I wish I could properly thank those priests who introduced me to homemade curry those summers. You might say they “curried” favor from me.

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The fruits of our labor. We are deep in the tomato harvest. In fact, we've been picking and eating them for about a month now. It took so long for them to start ripening because of that cold and awful June we had. And then those green tomatoes just sat on the vine day after day, not turning. But finally, they did and now they are coming so fast that we can't eat them all and that means canning!

I've canned tomatoes in the past, but not my own homegrown ones. I'm hoping these come out well. I had to re-learn a few things like the necessity that the glass jar be piping hot already before you put the tomatoes in and put it in the boiling water. We lost a whole jar of tomatoes to that broken-glass lesson. But everything went smoothly afterward and now we have eight quarts of tomatoes put up.

I don't know if our plants have much more in them before the frost comes and the tomato blights catch up to them, but if they do we'll can those too. Of course, once we go apple picking, we're definitely putting up a whole bunch of applesauce this year too. Mmmm.

There’s a new movie out about Julia Child, the famous (and some would say the best-ever) TV cook. Julia Child graced the airwaves of PBS for decades without pretentiousness, famed for her wit and easygoing style, especially in the face of culinary errors. The movie, “Julie & Julia”, is half biography of Julia child, half the story of a woman who cooks every recipe in her most famous cookbook, “Mastering The Art of French Cooking”, in one year.

I have special memories from my youth of Julia Child. My mom worked outside the home when I was in high school and as a single mom of 5 kids she would struggle to come home from work and cook a meal for us all. So the cooking duties began to devolve upon us. We’d come home from school, find a package of defrosting chicken in the sink and a note of instructions. It was during this time that my TV watching habits began to turn from typical teenage boy fare to PBS and the specifically to Julia Child. In the days before the Food Network, PBS was the place for televised cooking instruction, from Julia to “Yan Can Cook” to the Frugal Gourmet. But Julia was queen of them all.

I didn’t learn all my cooking skills from Julia—working in an Italian restaurant kitchen helped as well—but she was instrumental as inspiration. My very first cookbook was not “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which I think I found too intimidating, but another cookbook, “From Julia Child’s Kitchen”. I can’t say I cooked many recipes from it; despite being French cooking for the average American housewife, I was a teenager and our pantry was somewhat more limited than even her simplified recipes called for.

Yet there is one recipe from the book that brings back pleasant memories because it was the first major holiday dish I ever cooked for my family. I can’t say exactly what year it was, but I’d guess it was toward the end of my high school years. I’d seen an episode of Julia’s show in she made it and I told my mom that I would like to try to make it for the family. It was a roast leg of lamb— gigot d’agneau roti—and I would cook it for Easter dinner. I was determined to follow every instruction to the letter and prepare every ingredient as instructed, right down to getting the proper “whole” leg, including hip bone, main leg bone, and shank bone. Most supermarkets only sold them without the shank bone, but my mom went to the effort to find a butcher who could provide the proper lamb.

Long story, short—mainly because I don’t really remember most of the details—the lamb and its sauce were delicious. I made it every year after that until I moved to Steubenville for college and then made it a few times there for friends, but I don’t think I’ve made it more than once or twice since then. I recently picked a new hardbound copy of “From Julia Child’s Kitchen” on Bookmooch, to replace my now falling-apart original copy so it may be time to bring back that old favorite and to try some of those recipes I never had a chance to try back then.

And when I do I will lift a glass of wine in tribute to the dear lady who launched a love of food and cooking in a teenage boy those decades ago.

My co-worker who’s in Rome this week sent me a message today that he went out to Chinese food for supper. Chinese food? In Rome? The home of the world’s greatest cuisine?

Yeah. He said he’s tired of pasta.

He’s been in Rome for half a week so far! How can he be tired of pasta already? And there’s a whole universe of Italian food beyond pasta.

Such an opportunity, wasted! Oh, my breaking heart.

Can one copyright a recipe? You might be surprised to learn that you cannot. Then again, since recipes have been freely traded for ages, you might not be surprised.

The key is to look at the components of a recipe. In the 1996 decision Publications Intl. v. Meredith, the Supreme Court ruled that the a listing of ingredients and their quantity is a statement of facts and one of the most basic principles of copyright is that you can’t copyright a fact. If I write that the sky is blue, I can’t copyright that fact such that everyone else would have to get my permission to say that the sky is blue. Likewise, even though there are many variations on the recipe, you can’t copyright the fact that a particular recipe for, say, enchiladas, contains 1 pound of cooked, diced chicken.

As for the directions, that’s even more clearly not copyrightable. Because the recipe directions are either a “procedure, process, [or] system,” they can’t be copyright either, although unique systems can be patented. Of course, the patent process is long and expensive and it’s unlikely anyone will bother to file a patent for the instructions on how to make Grandma’s Chicken Soup.

What that leaves are the chef’s notes, illustrative description, photos and illustrations, and the layout of the cookbook. For example, you could take every recipe in Mario Batali’s latest cookbook and copy them onto a web site, leaving behind the introduction, the photos, and his notes on the preparation of the dish. That may not be ethical, but it’s probably legal.

But rather than steal someone else’s hard work, the spirit of the recipe exchange is that we all share good food. There is something about food and cooking and eating together that is essential to man’s communal nature. It’s why one of the symbolic meanings of the Mass is that of a ritual meal. So, yes, apart from all the legal and technical reasons why we don’t copyright recipes, there’s also the ineffable reason as well, the one that tells us that sharing good food made with love is essential to the human experience.