After noticing some definite similarities between a certain women’s magazine’s recipe section and a Donna Hay cookbook, I started to wonder where most food/lifestyle magazines get their recipes. Sure some of them quote directly from cookbooks (which they mention), but how many new recipes can they come up with? Do most freelancers or in-house test kitchens just tweak and reword recipes from other magazines, cookbooks, websites, etc.? Is this legal? Can they just add nuts to an existing, say, brownie recipe and call it their own (because really, how many ways are there to make chocolate brownies?)?
Legally, recipes can be copied endlessly - as long as you don’t copy exactly the words and form in which the recipe is printed.
You can have the exact same ingredients and instructions as long as you word them differently.
However, few magazines rely on this as a policy. Readers quickly figure out that the recipe for Crispy Chicken Mexicano is the same recipe as Crunchy Mexican-Style Chicken. So lots of experimentation and use of whatever vegetable, spice, cooking method, high-carb, low-carb, low-fat, extra-green, whatever, variation is what keeps them going.
I once read that anyone can write a cookbook just by compiling recipes from other cookbooks. I don’t know if that is true 100% but you can’t copyright an idea for a dish so recipes containing enhancements and slight variations are fine to publish. People with a true gift for cooking can tweak recipes almost intuitively so all the magazines have to do is to get someone to start with a great basic idea and tweak it so that they can publish it as a slightly original idea.
They license some of them from cookbooks, they hire freelancers for others of them, and develop more of them in house in their test kitchens.
Very few recipes come out of a vacuum, even a recipe that isn’t ‘copied’ from somewhere is still for a dish other people have made, with their own spin on it. A lot of the value in good recipes comes not from the ingedient list, but from the instructions, as well, and writing those is a fine art.