Recipes, Their Authors, and Their Names

In this paper we suggest that discussions about the identity of recipes should be based on a distinction between four categories of recipes. The central feature that we use to single out a category is the type of relationship that a recipe bears to its author. The first category comprises “open recipes” like wine, pizza, or salad, which come in taxonomic layers and are structurally open for new authors to reshape them. The second category comprises “institutional recipes,” namely those whose authors typically form consortium-like institutions, such as Champagne wines or Quebec maple syrup. The third category comprises “brand recipes” like Coca-Cola, Nutella, or Big Mac, whose names connote rather than denote recipes. Finally, the fourth category comprises “flagship recipes,” which include all the personal renditions of a recipe whose identity is strongly bound to individual authors. Besides its theoretical value, the classification we put forward is offered as a ground for settling legal disputes about recipes, evaluating charges of cultural appropriation that concern recipes, and guiding consumers, producers, and policy makers when they think about foods and diets. 1. Recipes, Their Authors, and Their Names The discourse about recipes has developed over the centuries without the aid of any systematic theory. As Borghini (2015) argues, such a theory is desirable because it offers a common ground for addressing legal disputes about recipes, evaluating charges of cultural appropriation that concern recipes, and guiding consumers, producers, and policy makers when they think about foods and diets. In this paper, we aim to move the theoretical debate on the metaphysics and ontology of recipes a step forward by outlining a fourfold distinction between † Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy. 144 Humana.Mente – Issue 38 kinds of recipes that is at once promising for the purposes of theoretical explanation and in keeping with social practices involving recipes. In particular, we show that the identity of recipes fundamentally depends on the social and legal norms that guide their naming, which we frame in terms of the authoriality relationship. Names of recipes comprise a wide variety of types of linguistic expressions, linked to culturally and historically complex arrays of practices, including linguistic practices. Some recipes owe their name to a place (e.g. Champagne wine) or to a person (e.g. fettuccine Alfredo); other recipe names express metaphors (e.g. spaghetti alla puttanesca) and others are deceptively descriptive (e.g. summer rolls or General Tso’s chicken). Throughout the paper, we consider different semantic and axiological properties of recipe names, mostly concerning social and legal norms that constrain their usage. We draw upon such properties to carve the recipe domain into four ontological categories—open recipes, institutional recipes, brand recipes, and signature recipes. These categories are part and parcel of what it is otherwise referred to as social ontology. The categories are not mutually exclusive, as it is occasionally possible for a recipe to fall within more than one of them simultaneously. We devote one section to each of these categories. The four types of recipes we propose crucially depend on specific kinds of authors. We employ this term—and the cognate expression “authoriality”—in a technical sense. Generally speaking, anybody who is entitled (it is yet to assess what does “entitled” mean in different cases) to play a role in the process of defining of a recipe counts as an author of that recipe. However, not every maker of a dish is a recipe author.1 This is easy to see if we think of a restaurant kitchen, 1 We write under the assumption that recipes and dishes are ontologically different objects, following Borghini (2015): “In a nutshell, a dish is the stuff, a recipe is the idea. More precisely, a dish is a specific concoction of (typically perishable) edible stuff, such as those specific actions that led to this slice of pizza sitting on my kitchen. On the other hand, a recipe—in first approximation—comprises the array of repeatable aspects of a dish whose replication would deliver a dish of the same sort” (pp. 721—722). The interdependence of recipes and dishes is a complex topic, on which we hope to cast some light throughout the paper. The interaction between the two levels can occur top-down (from recipes to dishes), bottom-up (from dishes to recipes), or both ways, due to the different normative and descriptive needs at stake in a particular situation. Authoriality can provide insights on these dynamics too. For additional discussion of the topic, see also Borghini & Engisch (2021). Recipes, Their Authors, and Their Names 145 in which dozens of people produce dishes under the direction of a few people in charge. Authoriality is often displayed in terms of semantic authority over recipe names. Since recipes are cultural entities, there is no belief-independent ontological ground that we can sharply separate from the ways in which we conceive and speak of them. For this reason, we suggest that authoriality is the trait d’union between the ontology and the semantics of recipes. Exploring recipes in terms of authoriality seems plausible because recipes are items within culinary cultures and it may seem natural to think that their identity depends to a large extent on the fiat of agents. As Borghini (2015) argues, the question of semantic and linguistic authority is central to a theory of recipes because in every instance in which a recipe gets executed we have new material constituents, new cooks, diners, and a novel context of consumption: getting clear on who has the authority to decide on the recipe name is crucial to address any dispute about its identity.