Plagiarism? In cookbooks? Gosh.

"Food influencer" accused of plagiarism. Gosh. You think?

First of all, welcome to the world of food. Everybody steals, copies, and tweaks. It's normal, because food is ephemeral and imprecise. My own stance on intellectual property (Doesn't exist. Make your name with valid, tangible, and more permanent assets.) aside, this just starts a squabble where nobody involved looks good. 

Unless it's really, really obvious. 

The person in question is Brooke Bellamy- an Australian TikTok-er who has some robust internet notoriety and a place called 'Brooki's Bakehouse'. She's also got a book "Bake With Brooki", which is where the trouble shows up. The allegations of pilfered recipes are very much justifiable. I looked for myself to be sure. As a chef and a recipe developer myself, I'd back them up. I would never have allowed something so blatant to hit the shelves. It's not James Beard levels of pilferage, but it's a different sort of bad when it's not even your own previous publications you're pilfering from. Worse still, the recipes came from other easily found places with operators who pay attention to this sort of thing.

Recipe Tin Eats is a site I'm less familiar with, but I also don't do a lot of recipe hunting. The owner Nagi's recent post showed an easy to follow comparison between the recipes in question. By my standards, it's fairly cut-and-dried. It was pointed out in the first place by her fanbase, who discovered it after some digging and brought it to light. If it's that obvious even to non-professionals... yeah.

Sally's Baking Addiction is another name listed, and an absolutely extraordinary resource for the modern home baker. Sally knows her stuff, takes great pictures, doesn't overdo it on the ads or the storytelling, and the recipes on her site do what they say they'll to- I've used plenty of them myself. When I'm doing my own recipe dev work, her site is on a list of many I check for baseline recipes to compare with. 

Here's an easy to follow example for you. I went back to look- Sally's oatmeal cookie has a great deal in common with my own oatmeal cookie. Did I steal it? No. Why is it similar? Home baking has limits. Equipment, ingredients, and yield don't vary much at all, mostly because of storage and intent. Almost nobody's batching dough for a gross of cookies at once- they're making a batch they can fit in a bowl and bake in a home oven to feed a small number of people. Those fairly narrow parameters can make for a lot of very similar recipes. But don't underestimate the power of research. It's way too easy to be found out if you just lifted something wholesale, and the general public is veeeery happy to pour a little poison on someone's reputation, deservingly or not.

If you're going to just up and take something, do it more like Dylan does. His cookbook recipes all come from other places, but everyone is quite well aware because it's part of his schtick. Taking the horrors of home kitchens past and making modern and palatable incarnations is nice. Highlighting recorded-but-forgotten delights is even nicer!

Me, I don't use TikTok, and had no idea who this Brooke lady was. But I sure do now. I'm not linking her website, her socials, and especially not her cookbook. Screw that.

A treasure of my youth appears to be gone.

 I spent a chunk of almost every summer of my teens up at Sabattis.

Seems like the modern BSA isn't enticing enough to keep attendance at numbers that'll let it stay open.

It'll be missed very much.

I hope everyone's ready to get a lot sicker a lot more often.

 

It's interesting how little I see from the mainstream food media these days since I stopped using Twitter some months back.

Not that I'm missing anything of substance. The vast majority is fluff pieces, any bits of harder-hitting reporting are elsewhere. Stuff like how desperately doomed most of the food production in the country is as regulatory standards for quality and safety get cut away.

Safe bet that a whoooole lot of people are going to realize how easy it is for foodborne illnesses to find their way into their supper. More than likely while they're dying after contracting them. I know how to prevent them, where to look for them, and how long I have before I start avoiding buying certain things. There's a tier list based on ease of contamination, severity of danger, and a host of other factors that I consider when looking at the months and years ahead. Here's a freebie: Don't buy salad greens.

Alongside this we have the backyard gardeners who have no idea what it's like to actually grow enough food to live off of. People that have never seen how much wheat it takes to mill into flour, and haven't a clue how to do the milling.

I'm lucky to live in a climate where I can grow damn near anything I please, but there's no possible way I could grow enough food to feed myself- I know this because I because I actually know how to do it- something near nobody willing to opine on such things can say.

In Memoriam

You were always game for anything, grinning like a goofus the whole time.

You deserved better last years than the ones I know you had.

That sorrow will stay with me forever.

Goodbye, Tiger. Uncle Wolfy loves you, now and always.

In Theory

...this is supposed to be a mostly profession-oriented blog. I am a master culinarian, recipe developer, teacher, nutritionist, and food safety analyst.

I am also a great deal more than that.

Given the state of things, however, oversharing is dangerous.

Paranoia and pragmatism now means peace of mind later. 

I've got my disaster bag prepped and ready.

Can't save everyone. Don't want to. Shouldn't have to- and most aren't capable of deserving it anyway.

I'll do what I can.

What a mess.

 

All those cuts to Meals on Wheels apparently went out over the last 24 hours or so.

So let me tell you, gentle reader, of the last 48.

Yesterday, I began to track down the family of a senior who died five years ago when mail showed up for her estate. Yes. They died in the first covid wave, amidst so many others. And disappeared. 

Today, I delivered a route, as I always do when a delivery crew fails to show. Someone who I'd spoken to on Monday didn't answer when I knocked. Thinking they might not yet be home, I called their contact number and got family. Poor man was on total life support, surrounded by loved ones. 

He died while I was on the line. I spent the next twenty minutes consoling half a dozen people I've never met as they broke down together.

This is the stuff they're taking away the funding for. Not hard to guess why- beyond the simple cruelty and ignorance, at least. Hungry people get angry, they get aggressive, they get things happening. People like this don't. They're already on the last of their resources. They'll simply fade and die, unknown and forgotten. Often, I joke that the motto of our center should be "Forgotten But Not Gone". I don't forget easily.

"To ignore the plight of those one could conceivably save is not wisdom, it is indolence"

In a world steeped in malice, I think those words ring true for those who seek a better world.

Why? Simple.

"For those we have lost. For those we can yet save."

And so I battle onward. As best I might.

Girl Scout Cookies: What's New?

 

It's been a looooong time since I had the chance to get ahold of any Girl Scout cookies. I'm not going to do any major digging into the changes that have happened even since I was in high school with Girl Scouts, but... I remember when these cookies were 3 bucks a box, and the boxes were definitely a fair bit bigger.

No sense in beating around the bush about price and proper valuation though. Other things I remember offhand... there are a couple bakeries that produce all the cookies, and they're thousands of miles apart, which is why some cookies have different names in different parts of the US. Out here in California, the Shortbread I knew growing up is called a Trefoil. Makes perfect sense looking at it, but still. Different suppliers, different name to protect all the companies from copyright blather. (Not that copywrites actually matter in the food world, but on the corporate side they pretend.)

I picked up a few boxes. Though apparently they're not all even boxes any more!

The order sheet was my only information, and so I went with what made some appeal to my preferences. I got a box of the iconic Thin Mints, and two other types that are wholly new to me. A gluten-free Caramel Chocolate Chip, and crispy chocolate, caramel-cored curiosities called Adventurefuls. 

Now one thing that threw me was the vastly different weights of the three varieties. 5oz, 6 1/2oz, and 9oz. That's no small discrepancy, and it's... interesting that the GF cookies are the lightest. The ingredients couldn't possibly be that much more expensive. The different packaging could account for some of the difference, but what was wrong with the classic two-channel sleeved box? That's the big thing I was wondering about when I went ahead and opened them all to have a proper look.

And then came the taste test.

The Caramel Chocolate Chip are interesting. They're very crunchy, but also extremely light. The use of oat flour as a primary gives them a texture and flavor vaguely reminiscent of a peanut butter cookie, which is a sandiness I find rather unpleasant. The caramel flavor is heavy and cloying, as one-note and artificial as it gets. You can't even taste the chocolate chips- though admittedly there aren't many. These are to Famous Amos as Oreo are to Hydrox. They tried, but it's just not quite right. Yes, even without the cachet of being the actual original in the genre, the Hydrox was a far superior cookie to Oreo. Given some of the horrorshow flavors Oreo has tried bringing to bear, it seems an apt comparison.

The Adventurefuls were a very different sort of unfortunate. "Brownie-inspired cookies with caramel-flavored creme and a hint of sea salt". Jibberish. (If a Brownie inspired this, she'll never make a proper Girl Scout, let alone the Gold Award.) It's supposed to be a chocolate 'thumbprint' style cookie, a shallow well that's filled with faux caramel, then decorated with pretty chocolate stripes. Or they would have been, had anything about the designs worked right. 

The cookies arrived half-melted, some stuck together, and the box wasn't even full! The picture is missing two but I'd only eaten one. That pretend caramel flavor overpowered almost everything here too, except for the cookie hidden underneath it all. Hard and crispy, it has the feel and texture of the Thin Mint base cookie- which is probably why the camouflage. Can't make it too obvious they're double dipping on a winner, even when it turns into a loser- which this definitely is.

Well, that was a bust- and at seven bucks a box, it was an expensive one! Mathing it out by the weights listed on the boxes, the cookies were about 16 bucks a pound. I've paid more for cookies, but they were waaaaaay better cookies. Like the local place Butter Pecan, where the cookies are actually worth that kind of price.

Sorry, girls. I'm not buying again.