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It’s bewildering to think how many recipes are inundated in the foodie world: cookbooks, magazines, menu cards, and now even Substack and TikTok. A Google search for the exact words “sticky toffee pudding recipe” brings up just under 100,000 results. Of course, I haven’t checked to see if they all include the necessary method and ingredients, but I scrolled through 32 pages and still found variations on the same theme. And that’s enough for me.
Have you ever wondered who writes those massive instructions?
Part of the answer is people like me. I’ve been a ghostwriter and recipe contributor to cookbooks that have sold over 4 million copies and written hundreds, maybe thousands, of recipes for television shows. I’ve written books to help people stay lean and maintain their shape and made beetroot-juice-marinated eggs for health-conscious royalty. I recently spent a tumultuous few days learning how to bake bread in an air fryer. If you’ve been exposed to any food media in the last 20 years, you’ve likely read, watched, or cooked one of my recipes.
I was once a chef, as you probably know him: a Gitanes-smoking, overworked nihilist working in the kitchens of huge hotels in Paris, then in tiny gastropubs in England. But I couldn’t see a long-term future as a white chef, so I moved from the chaos of restaurants to the chaos of TV production. I became a home economist, helping the chef-host prepare food so he could focus on hosting. It was while on set that I was offered my first ghostwriting job. The show’s host had secured a last-minute publishing deal for a book to accompany the next series, but didn’t have time to write it. I knew the hosts, and I knew their food, so it was the obvious choice. I was ecstatic.
Being a recipe writer and developer is closer to a “normal” life than being a chef. It’s also arguably more interesting. Last month I was writing a fancy Father’s Day recipe for a supermarket publication. This month I was designing a cookery course for a charity that helps rehabilitate prisoners through restaurants. If I were a commissary chef in a Michelin restaurant, I’d be repeating the same recipes over and over again at the same time. Mise en place I stand in the same place every day.
Recipes help capture consumer attention Brands and chefs. They are the real and sellable side of our industry. That means there is an almost unquenchable demand for more, despite the sheer number that already exists. But the truth is that it is nearly impossible to “invent” something that a home cook can achieve. While it was once easy to bring unexpected flavor combinations to classic recipes, the market is now saturated. I once thought I had come up with an original flavor combination for a pie by combining lemon thyme with blueberries. Then I Googled the combination and found that many others had realized it before me. Lemon thyme and blueberry scones, lemon thyme and blueberry sponge cake, lemon thyme and blueberry jam… If you have thought it, someone else has probably thought it too.
With a booming marketplace demanding novelty, plagiarism can be a serious problem. In my industry, there is a widely accepted rule that a recipe is original if it is 20 percent different from other recipes, but this is a rumor that has evolved into a rule of thumb, not based on a legally binding mandate. To some extent, it certainly makes sense. There is no point in spending time trying to reinvent the wheel of white sauce or Victoria sponge if the perfect recipe already exists. When I try to write something new, I first look at some existing recipes, read about the origins of the dish, and then flesh it out with new ideas and flavor combinations. However, there is one big catch: when a writer appropriates an existing, tried-and-true recipe, there is a very good chance that they will ruin the recipe with their self-imposed 20 percent edits. I’ve done this myself. Take, for example, a bread recipe I was working on. I was inspired by a great focaccia recipe that a friend of mine came up with. But I wanted to add some whole wheat flour to add a little fiber, so I replaced 25 percent of the white flour with whole wheat flour. The result was technically “good,” but it didn’t have the fluffiness of focaccia, so I gradually reduced the amount of whole wheat flour, and then gradually reduced it again, and then reduced it again until I was adding just 5 percent coarse wheat flour. At this point I decided that focaccia is focaccia because it’s white and hearty, and that I’d have to find fiber elsewhere.
Once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing suspiciously similar recipes popping up everywhere. There’s a great, well-known scone recipe created and written by a famous baker who broadcasts from a tent. This is the one I make most of the time because they’re tasty and reliable. It’s also easy to spot because it has an unusually high amount of leavening agent and very little butter. I’ve seen variations of this recipe in several places on the Internet, all with slight tweaks to the original, like a little more butter or a little less baking powder. Ultimately, they’re just imitations of the perfect recipe, and I know they only exist because there’s a demand for new and innovative recipes.
But there is still joy. What I find most satisfying is introducing methods and recipes to an audience that may not have been exposed to that type of cooking before. For example, I have written several books for clients who have gained a huge fan base and have been successful in convincing them to cook from scratch. For that author, I was able to write recipes such as steak with chimichurri or tandoori chicken with flatbread because I knew that their audience probably had never made such dishes before. My job was simply to introduce traditional cooking methods to a new audience. This has always been part of the role of a recipe writer and is as valuable as invention. Elizabeth David’s skill was in recording recipes and introducing them to new markets. Jamie Oliver significantly revamped the British food scene by successfully incorporating restaurant knowledge into everyday cooking. My grandmother wrote recipes for the Gas Commission and was part of a team that traveled around the country to show potential customers how to cook traditional recipes in their new gas ovens.
What shocks people the most in my work is not that brands work with recipe developers, but that some celebrity chefs do. But if you think about it, you realize that this practice is not egregious, but rather essential, if you consider what it takes to produce a quality book with 100+ recipes that work, taste good, and look fresh on a regular basis. When demand is so high, it is preferable for an author to hire help, rather than cutting corners and publishing half-baked recipes. There is a story circulating in the industry that one celebrity chef submitted a book manuscript with hyperlinks still attached, because he copied and pasted directly from a popular cooking website. It is fair to say that the book was rejected. The most successful chef brands are often quite public about this relationship. Jamie Oliver has a dedicated culinary team, Yotam Ottolenghi has a test kitchen.
I am very lucky to work in the food industry and get paid to do what I love, but it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. At one time, tricks, shortcuts, and money saving tips were all the rage. I got tired of them, my culinary brain was exhausted, and I realized I wasn’t writing anything of quality, so I stopped writing recipes altogether. But trends change, and it’s so gratifying to see the quality and variety of recipes on the shelves skyrocket. I feel that way when I look at books by authors like Anna Jones and Katherine Phipps, who are respectively stars and rising stars in the cookbook world. Both of them wrote for others for years before writing under their own names. Sure, their books may be surrounded by other books that, in my opinion, are trying to sell on the zeitgeist, but at least they’re written and published. I’ve also started writing recipes, not as many as I used to, but I’m proud that everything I write now is connected, even if you’ll never know it was me.
Rob Allison is a recipe developer and writer based in London.
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