A quick word on Copyright and Recipes on this Blog

Dear Everyone

I don’t really want to get involved in the current debate, I wrote a post a long time ago about my views on this which you can see here. I have been thinking a lot about it lately and after various conversations with a couple of good friends of mine, I have been back and taken out sections of posts which I think might be considered to be in breach of copyright. I haven’t quite finished doing them all so bear with me while I do. I could take the whole blog off line until I have done it, but that would be a bit much.

For the time being I am leaving the Hamelman ones as they are, some of which have lists of ingredients with suggested quantities. I am going to look at them all as I go through my back posts. The Hamelman ones are slightly different in that, for nearly all of them the recipes have been scaled down or converted into grams. Jeffrey Hamelman has generally given bloggers to understand that he doesn’t mind them writing in detail about his recipes. If however, I hear from him to the contrary I am perfectly happy to take down, edit those posts too, or anyone else who contacts me about any post I have written.

A very long time ago I queried the ‘adaptation of recipes’ with a famous blogger, Susan of Wild Yeast. She wrote to Jeffrey Hamelman at the time, and then receiving an answer, wrote a post about it. Since then I too have been guilty of the ‘well everyone else does it, so I guess it’s all right mentality’ and have sometimes written out adapted posts.

I can’t say whether or not this has discouraged readers from buying the books for themselves. I would hope that my enthusiasm for books that are not always visible in shop windows and on displays has encouraged some of you to buy them. I would be really pleased if readers bought books on the strength of my recommendations, but that isn’t why I write posts. I am not a professional reviewer after all.

I have never cut and pasted the text in full of any recipe, but that doesn’t meant that posts where I have maybe changed one or two things in the ingredient list are not ‘derivative works’.

I would hate to think that I was part of the problem and not part of the solution so in order to protect the livelihoods of the authors who work so hard to produce the books I love I have decided to do this. It is a moral issue for me, not a legal one.

WordPress of course, encourage bloggers to include recipes in their posts, if you read what they say about getting recognition and lots of traffic to your blog that is one of the things they recommend but they don’t specifically say write your own recipes. Anyway I don’t need lots of traffic, I don’t gain financially from writing a blog, it isn’t linked to any book, or TV show. I get roughly three to four hundred hits on this blog a day at the present time, most of whom never comment or hit the Like button so who knows what they are looking for? If they are looking for published authors’ recipes then they will either have to follow the links to where they are officially published on the internet or buy their books.

I think in the years I have been writing this blog I have received four bottles of food essences and a jar of honey from Bakery Bits as a thank you for helping them by making loads of suggestions as to what they should buy and offer to the baking community and for helping write a piece about caring for bannetons. I like to think that everyone has benefited from them stocking the hard to find items that I wanted. I wrote about my relationship with Bakery Bits back then in a post here. I am not on their staff, and have bought every other item that I have used from them. I get a 10% discount as a friend.

I received some rye flour yesterday from Felin Ganol, they are experimenting with trying to produce a fine dark rye flour for English home bakers at my request that is something similar to German 1150. I will send them the postage for the flour and I will bake with it and see what it’s like, doing test baking as best I can. I might write about it too here if it is interesting but I will always tell you what the background is to something like that. That’s the sum of my financial gains from writing this blog.

‘To live outside the law one must be honest’ Bob Dylan

This is something I aspire to even though I don’t succeed usually. Or as WordPress reminded me just now on publishing this one. (They like to give you an encouraging word these days each time you publish a new post….)

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.Tennessee Williams

I compromise on my morals in so many ways and this is one of them so to feel comfortable in my skin and continue with this public blog I am doing this. If I wanted to write out all the recipes for myself as a record I could easily make this blog ‘private’. WordPress give you that option of course. A blog is more than a diary, it is a public document and as such I have responsibilities.

I am turning off comments on this one. It’s not a discussion post just a statement.

Peace be with you all.

Buddha with snowdrops

Aebleskiver for Pancake Day

Before anyone says anything, yes I know these aren’t pancakes and that pancakes are flat and cooked on both sides in a frying pan. However, these are what I was asked to make today by Brian and he doesn’t ask for specific things very often; he was made to eat salad, griddled vegetables and chicken first. (Griddled by the way for my overseas friends, means cooked on a flat cast iron pan with ridges on the stove top in my British home.)

I had never heard of these round batter balls which resemble nothing more than a slightly sweet Yorkshire Pudding masquerading as a miniature football until I saw the pan for sale in the Lakeland catalogue. Once I had the pan I set about finding out about them and the traditions associated with them. Before all the Danes tell me I’m making them at the wrong time of year and they are for eating before Christmas with glogg, yes I know that but they are too nice to only have in December and a quick squint down the Wiki list of Aebleskiver traditions in the States shows them being eaten at all times of the year, including this very night in Urbandale, Iowa, so I had company!

I think we didn’t have them as children because my Mother wouldn’t have liked their squidgy insides, she liked her pancakes more in the French style, thin and crispy crepes, like the ones I make usually. I don’t remember them either at any of my relatives’ homes, but maybe my sister remembers them?

Aebleskiver (literally apple slices) are far more common in their native country, Denmark and I suspect in the USA too, which has so many people of Danish descent living there. Certainly the internet is swamped with videos and restaurants offering these robust pancake balls and it is easy enough to work out the technique from watching a few videos.

The recipe I used for my batter is adapted from a sourdough aebleskiver formula from Teresa of NorthWest Sourdough, which you can find in her wonderful E-book and as a pdf on her site. My version doesn’t have much sugar in and uses a lot less butter, but it’s basically the same sort of thing. Any thick pancake or waffle type batter will do a similar job.

Brian and I speculated as we drizzled golden syrup over the tops of ours as to whether in fact Yorkshire puddings were a legacy of the Viking invasion and whether or not we could make Yorkshire puddings this way at Christmas, using dripping in the batter. We thought it might be rather good. Yorkshire Puddings, though now eaten with the meat and veggies all together on the plate, were I believe eaten with sugar as a ‘pudding’ originally, cooked beneath the roasting meat and basted with the fat and juices that dripped down as the meat cooked.

Anyway, these are great fun to make and if you can find a pan at a reasonable price, it is one that I have used several times and we are very fond of making them. These ones today we filled with small pieces of apple, but we have tried them with banana and eaten them with yoghurt and icing sugar on top too.

I think they could catch on here if the pans were cheaper. I know that you can currently get them from a Danish food importer based here in the UK so if you really want one have a quick google and you will find them.

February Flapjacks

Now is the season of my discontent
Made happy eating by this plate of flapjacks

250 g Porridge oats
175 g soft butter
85 g of chopped glacé cherries
60 g of slightly crushed flaked almonds
50 g of salted caramel sauce or 50 g golden syrup (Choclette is right and I had too much sweet stuff here – been back and weighed properly when I made them again, and have dropped the syrup quantities)
125 g soft brown sugar
two capfuls of Kirsch (why not? – actually don’t, because you can’t taste it…)

These have always been called flapjacks in England as far as I know, though I understand from my transatlantic readers that the word flapjack is used to describe a popular breakfast pancake in the US and Canada. Another one of those words that has two different uses. See the comments for the discussion on this. Continue reading →