I meant to blog about this, but got caught up in “ohmigodabortionart”, but I suspect better late than never. Matt is wondering why it might have been hard to pry a few favorite recipes out of Cindy McCain.
Looks like someone on John McCain’s staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain’s family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn’t have any favorite recipes, it’s not as if failing to include a “Cindy’s recipes” section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.
First thought: Hey, what if Food Network recipes really are her favorite? Just kidding. I had to blog this because I’m sort of surprised that Matt didn’t bring up the obvious answer to the question of why Cindy McCain probably doesn’t have recipes to put up on the site: I doubt she does much cooking, if any at all.
I mean, think about it. McCain is the daughter of an extremely wealthy man who made his money through a beer distribution company. In fact, if you read Glenn Greenwald’s book, you’ll see there’s good reason to believe that part of the reason that John McCain aggressively courted her while still married to his first wife was that her wealth and connections would help get him into politics. And by “aggressively court”, I mean “most likely had an adulterous affair”, because he did, after all, marry Cindy within a month of divorcing his first wife. But this is a long way of saying that Cindy McCain is probably someone whose wealth means that she doesn’t really have to do much cooking for herself, and thus wouldn’t have favorite recipes. Not, I must stress, that I would hold that against her. There is no reason a woman should have to cook if she doesn’t want to.
So why have the recipe section on there? It wouldn’t really be that easy to avoid it. While the strict recipe issue wouldn’t be a devastating liability, it’s part of a larger image that McCain does have to uphold if he wants to win over the base. And that image is that he’s the same old grandpa you know and love enough to laugh at when he’s being gruff and rude. And what’s loveable old (if racist and sexist) grandpa, without grandma in the kitchen doing all the work while he watches sports and talks politics? This image is perceived, quite rightly, as critical to McCain’s ability to win. The reality—a man who married into wealth and connections to get his political career going—will be considered emasculating, especially, as Greenwald points out, to a crowd that just recently got a big kick out of calling John Kerry a “gigolo” because he married wealthy, though he was not dependent on his wife’s wealth and connections for his political career to near the extent that McCain has relied on his wife’s. So the recipes are the exact issue, but they hint at a larger image issue that he has to deal with.
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The recipe thing is bizarre - she has a degrees in special education and a bunch of philanthropic work behind her, plus the adorable story of how they got their fourth daughter. Why not have her do what she would obviously be a natural at, organizing photo ops of her helping disabled children or something similar?
And personally, now that I know his wife’s beer connections, if I don’t see McCain guzzling Bud at every opportunity I’ll have to call bullshit on his lovable grandpa act. Sure, my own grandfather was a scotch guy, but my children’s grandfather would totally be a Budwieser man.
Ever since Hillary, political women have been, er, proudly baking cookies. So it doesn’t surprise me that McCain’s campaign would think there had to be a recipe section. But the complete inability to execute something even that simple is of a piece with the economic “plan”, the foreign “policy” and the rest of it.
I think this story underlies for me how casual they’re lying is.
One thing I like about the Obama campaign is that they’re not pushing Michelle’s recipes. Of course, it’s early in the campaign season; we may be forced to see a cook-off between her and Cindy by fall, just like Hillary and Barbara Bush had to issue competing cookie recipes in 1992.* (Hillary’s won.)
*Hands up if you actually think BB ever baked a cookie in her life.
This is unfair! She was asked to provide recipes for her favourite foods but rather than writing her own, she found a recipe for the same food online and posted that.
This avoids the effort of thinking about how you make a food you just “throw together” (like my famous vegan lasagne) and also enables you to blame someone else if your punters try it and hate it (like my infamous vegan lasagne).
My partner and I are often asked for recipes for non-Japanese food we have cooked by our Japanese friends. We usually cooked it from our own recipe but heaven forbid we give them that - these are our friends you know! So we find one online.
It’s a combination of laziness and arse-covering but doesn’t mean they aren’t her favourites.
You’re right on the money. We have to make sure she looks like a little domestic woman here or else McCain has no balls! I wonder if Cindy knew AT ALL what was going on with this “favorite recipes” thing. Odds are 50/50 some campaign person decided “oh, just rip some off” without even mentioning it to her, all for the looks. Not that I’m really defending her, but I doubt it was her decision 100% here. Or that she’s even looked on Food Network.
Yeah, the McCain/Obama bakeoff will come soon. Sigh.
Arrrghh… I work for the “mainstream media”. I work for freakin’ NPR and am a news and politics junkie, and I’ve never heard this.I’m am going to be so in peoples’ faces on Monday.
(I’m in Engineering, don’t blame me)
She apparently pulled the same stunt for Yankee Magazine’s “Cookie Primary”.
This is unfair! She was asked to provide recipes for her favourite foods but rather than writing her own, she found had one of her staffers go tell one of the interns to find a recipe for the same food online and posted that.
—–
Fixed.
Um…
no workie?Um …
no workie?The really weird thing about this is that Matt grew up surrounded by the extremely wealthy so he knows that many of them have employed cooks.
Why would Cindy care about recipes? She doesn’t look like she ever eats. You can’t hide nuthin under those tight white pants she’s partial to.
One thing I like about the Obama campaign is that they’re not pushing Michelle’s recipes.
Ironic, since Michelle is probably one of the only potential first-spouses to have cooked a meal for herself and her family within the last 20 years.
Not only that, but they used a Rachael Ray recipe, for god’s sake. At least it wasn’t Sandra Lee, I guess.
Inspired by the photo, my family recipe for marinara sauce. (Actual family recipe — from my mom!) (Well, okay, the red bell pepper is my personal touch.)
1.5 lbs of chopped tomatoes (Parmalat Pomì/Chopped tomatoes (the 750 g/26.455 oz boxes) are convenient for this)
1 medium onion, chopped
1/4 cup of parsley, chopped
1/4 of a red bell pepper, chopped
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 glass of red wine
pinch of oregano
1/4 cup basil chopped basil
1/2 teaspoon of salt
pinch of pepper
pinch of cayenne pepper
1. In saucepan, sautée onion, parsley, and red bell pepper first.
2. Once onion, parsley, and garlic are about as fried as you want it to be (translucent, browned, whatever), add tomatoes, red wine, and other ingredients. Stir.
3. Simmer covered on low heat for until sauce achieves appropriate consistency — 30 minutes to 1 hour, depending on how thick you prefer your sauce to be.
Good with spaghetti, or capellini, or tricolor fusilli, or whatever. I usually eat it with some nutritional yeast mixed in. Non-vegans may prefer permasan cheese — although they should give nutritional yeast a try for shits and giggles (whether to be pleasantly surprised, repelled, or indifferent).
I think I know how to redeem the terrible debate.
Chairman Kaga invites the candidates to a showdown in Kitchen Stadium. Winner gets the presidency.
Today’s theme ingredient is…
MONKFISH.
(Gets Seafood Watch card out of hip pocket). Um, no, monkfish is on the “Avoid” list.
So Ms. Money-class-and-connections married this guy a month after his divorce? She may as well get a tattoo on her forehead that says “I think fucking married men is an acceptable form of husband hunting.”
Pretty sordid way to start a marriage. And lends a bit of credibility to that story about him calling her an over-made-up trollop.
I think I know how to redeem the terrible debate.
Chairman Kaga invites the candidates to a showdown in Kitchen Stadium. Winner gets the presidency.
Today’s theme ingredient is…
MONKFISH.
I totally support this!
Not running for anything nor is my spouse, but I don’t have any personal, special family recipes. If I want spaghetti sauce, there’s a jar of Prego. If I want soup, I love my local Trader Joe’s. If I want to bake cookies, I’ll use the Tollhouse recipe. So?
I HATE HATE HATE how women “have” to provide Their Own Family Recipes to prove some level of domesticity. Why is this just with cooking? Why don’t they have to provide Their Favorite Needlepoint Stitch too? Or Their Favorite Household Cleanser?
You know what I really don’t understand about all this?
1. Cindy McCain did not actually build this website, and probably had nothing to do with creating the content for it. So why didn’t whatever staffer was responsible for this bit of scenery just call up someone she or he knew who might plausibly have their own recipes? Isn’t it better to pass your grandmother’s recipes off as Cindy McCain’s than to just brazenly cut-and-paste from a Rachel Ray cookbook?
2. Don’t most people just get their recipes from cookbooks, the food channel, the web, etc nowadays? The only recipes I have handed down through family and/or made up on my own are recipes for traditional Cajun food. And it would not surprise me to find out that my parents just taught me what they read in any of a number of Cajun cookbooks. My ‘family’ gumbo recipe is probably straight off of Emeril Lagasse’s website, I just don’t know it yet.
3. Why are so few people talking about the real meat of the recipe pages, which is that they sure are some ELITIST recipes. Weren’t they all for seared ahi tuna steaks, passionfruit mousse, etc? Another reason the staffer who put this together is an idiot. If you’re creating a website to make Cindy “Cougar” McCain seem like somebody’s sweet down-home granny, why would you pick that stuff?
Or Their Favorite Household Cleanser?
It actually would not surprise me at all if Michelle Obama is eventually forced to do some sort of ‘Greening the White House’ thing, a la Jackie Kennedy’s White House renovation tour, where she talks about how the cleaning staff have replaced their chemical-laden supplies with Dr. Bronner’s, Mrs. Meyer’s, Seventh Generation, etc.
I say Michelle Obama because the media would never force Bill Clinton through that kind of farce, and do you really think the McCain administration is going to give a rat’s ass about the environment?
And it would not surprise me to find out that my parents just taught me what they read in any of a number of Cajun cookbooks. My ‘family’ gumbo recipe is probably straight off of Emeril Lagasse’s website, I just don’t know it yet.
My grandmother made matzah balls stright from the package and used potato flakes when she needed mashed potatoes for a recipe. Thus, I proudly wave the banner of shortcut cooking high as a three-generation family tradition.
(Of course, a lot of the other family tradition recipes *are* intensive and time-consuming, as I’m learning this Passover.)
Actually, the “what if the Food Network recipes really are her favorites” thought was my first thought as well. I LOVE to cook, but I’m just learning, so the vast majority of my current favorite recipes are absolutely things I’ve gotten off of the Food Network website. What’s the matter with that? In order to be properly “domestic” you have to come up with your own recipes from scratch? Why not take help where you can get it?
So why didn’t whatever staffer was responsible for this bit of scenery just call up someone she or he knew who might plausibly have their own recipes?
Well, I suspect the intern responsible is a typical college Republican dude. His mom probably has a box of recipes, but he would never ask her for them, lest his balls shrivel right up. Anyway, like from a family of super-Republicans, so their family recipes are probably all Jello molds and stuff.
Not only that, but they used a Rachael Ray recipe, for god’s sake.
“Pray now the prayer of revenge. From whom do you seek revenge?”
“I seek revenge on Rachael Ray and the Food Network. Can’t you make her… eyes fall out or something? …Tits fall off?”
“Satan, grant this man to get the revenge against his foes at the Food Network.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Coool…”
What’s wrong with Jello molds?
Why not take help where you can get it?
I think the issue here is more that the recipes were directly plagiarized, and probably a violation of copyright, rather than “Cindy McCain is so unwomanly that she doesn’t even invent her own recipes!!11!!1!”
That said, sometimes the politics I imagine are saner than the politics that actually exist.
Either way, if McCain really turns to Giada deLaurentiis and Rachel Ray for dinner inspiration, the smart thing to do would be to either avoid a “Cindy’s Recipes” section of the website or to provide links to the recipes she used on the Food Network site rather than claiming credit for them.
Thought of a really interesting aspect of this, just now. Sorry to be monopolizing this thread, btw.
This is yet another example of the right dreaming up domestic idylls that don’t exist and haven’t existed in a great many years.
I’m 27 and have learned to cook in the era of Food Network, celebrity chefs, and epicurious.com. Aside from a few recipes I attribute to family but don’t have a provenance for, I get all my inspiration from culinary media (even if said media is the back of the Tollhouse package).
My mother is 48 and is even more a devotee of the Food Network than I am. She owns a recipe box, but most of the cards are transcribed notes from TV cooking shows. All the big celebrity chefs have cookbook space in her kitchen, from Bobby Flay to Morimoto. Worships at the altar of Rachel Ray.
My grandmothers are both firmly within the Julia Child and Frugal Gourmet tradition, and both have always had shelves of commercially produced cookbooks standing by.
You have to go back 4 generations to find women in my family who had traditional family recipes handed down since the dawn of time, sprung fully formed from the head of Hestia or whoever. Way further even than the Republican idealization of the 50’s.
And yet the McCain campaign continues to try to sell this fiction that died before Cindy McCain was even born. Now they’re getting caught out, and instead of the media ratting out the fact that the Mayberry lifestyle the Republicans glorify never existed, they just heap the blame on that rich bitch Cindy McCain.
As usual, I must echo everyone else on the thread: who has old family recipes anymore? When I cook, I cook things out of cookbooks, so if someone asked for my favorite recipes, I’d direct them to those books (and websites).
I completely agree with the idea that most people don’t have “family recipes” any more, but the key to plagiarism is LACK OF CITATION. If the website had just said something like, “I’d been looking for a lighter dish than my traditional chicken-fried steak, so I found this great ahi recipe on the Food Network and now I make it all the time,” everything would be hunky-dory. It’s the lie that matters, pretending she made it up, not the lack of tradition.
OK, I’m going to be really pedantic and correct myself — when I said ‘the frugal gourmet’ above, I meant ‘the galloping gourmet’. The Frugal Gourmet show was on in the 80’s and early 90’s, well after my grandmothers learned to cook.
i can’t believe that they’re still doing this! I wrote a letter to the editor of my local paper over 20 years ago objecting to this ‘behind every good man is a good woman…good cook’ crap. if they must, put in McCain’s recipes. how ’bout for those famous hot dogs that he grills up. he could call the recipe ‘media weenies’!
Hello, over here. Please don’t make the NYT-journalism-style error of looking around and figuring that if you and your friends don’t do it, nobody does it.
Of course, my family recipes aren’t mysteriously in sync with whatever happens to be popular in expensive restaurants (seared ahi tuna? right, just like Grandma made in the Depression).
I’m with Amanda on this one–as I recall it was disclosed that the intern was a guy, and it’s probably some overprivileged Republican college brat who Googled recipes for whatever he had on an expense-account lunch last week.
Ironic, since Michelle is probably one of the only potential first-spouses to have cooked a meal for herself and her family within the last 20 years.
Well, Hillary admits she’s a lousy cook, though she makes pretty good scrambled eggs. It’s pretty safe to say that Barb and Cindy never even got to the scrambled egg stage. I dunno about Laura.
I’m amazed that this is even up for discussion. Well, that’s not exactly true.
Frankly, whether Cindy McCain cooks her own food or not isn’t the sort of burning question I ponder when choosing a president. And the only reason Michelle Obama might cook at all is that she’s about 30 years younger and has small children. Given the $10,000 she spends on extra curricular activities for her kiddoes (just like all us middle class folks, don’t ya know!), surely she could find the cash to get a maid.
Cindy McSame cooking? Dear me, just look at her surgery. Anywhere near the stove and she would melt like the witch from OZ.
McSame is pandering to the lower classes. They all cook and watch children and barely finish the local paper. So, he panders to their lacks.
Since when is cooking gender related? Condi Rice is a fantabulous shoe shopper and token, should we assume her skill set extends to culinary artistry?
Technocracygirl - I just made my matzoh ball soup yesterday from the Streit’s package. Oh, and threw in a few extra Wyler’s chicken bouillon cubes just for fun. I guess that’s my family recipe! lol
I hate the whole charade of finding out the candidates’ (and their spouses’) favorite recipes, bands, colors, flag pin preferences, etc. It’s exactly those distractions that have nothing to do with governing the country that Obama put on notice in Thursday’s Colbert Report. (BTW, Edwards ROCKED during that episode.)
Berkeleymom - I hope that we’re not judging women based on their appearance or weight.
“I completely agree with the idea that most people don’t have “family recipes” any more, but the key to plagiarism is LACK OF CITATION. If the website had just said something like, “I’d been looking for a lighter dish than my traditional chicken-fried steak, so I found this great ahi recipe on the Food Network and now I make it all the time,” everything would be hunky-dory. It’s the lie that matters, pretending she made it up, not the lack of tradition.”
Oh please. When I got married, my mother gave me a bunch of recipe cards from her group of friends. I haven’t ever made half of them, but whatever. They’re not trademarked or copyrighted. If I made one and it became my favorite whatever, I don’t really need to credit the other person (”my mother’s former neighbor’s mother-in-law’s sister’s favorite recipe for spaghetti sauce”). It’s a goddam recipe. They aren’t owned by the people who make them.
It’s a goddam recipe. They aren’t owned by the people who make them.
Unless, of course, they’re copyright, and you simply cut and paste from the web, word for word from whoever it is that writes out Giada deLaurentiis and Rachel Ray’s recipes.
Recipes from a cookbook or other published source (I’m pretty sure the web counts, and their appearance on the Food Network totally counts) are intellectual property, subject to the same rules as anything else.
If it turned out your mother’s former neighbor’s mother in law’s sister got her recipe out of a Martha Stewart cookbook, and you claimed it as your own in some kind of public sense (for instance said so on your widely visible website), you would be subject to copyright law if anyone ever discovered that was the case.
OK, off to find something to do with these Portobello mushrooms I picked up at the greenmarket yesterday…
Is the concern here really about intellectual property rights? Or is it more the fact that the Left is taking potshots at an accomplished, wealthy, high-profile woman because her husband is the Republican presidential candidate? I suspect it is the latter, particularly when Amanda says she “doesn’t care” whether or not Cindy McCain cooks. The fact is, fussing over this is just as sexist as fussing over Hillary Clinton’s cookie recipe.
Is the concern here really about intellectual property rights?
In terms of how and why this garnered media attention, yes, it’s because of intellectual property rights.
The McCain campaign was discovered to have stolen the recipes from the Food Network website, where they were credited to two cooking shows, and not to Cindy McCain.
If it was just the left trying to find something to mock about Cindy McCain, I’m not sure we would be taking this particular tack. Not to mention of course that I’m pretty sure this story did not break on the left, but was discovered and made public by the MSM. It’s not like this first appeared in Utne Reader or something…
sharon, agreed that some of the criticism of Cindy McCain is off base. The legitimate attack is on the campaign. The point of the recipe web page was to buttress the idea that Cindy plays the traditional wifely role in the McCain marriage, and secondarily that the McCain’s are “normal” rather than creatures of wealth and privilege.
It’s possible to point out the many levels of dishonesty going on here, all the way from having Cindy’s name on a web page that I doubt she ever saw to the pattern of disguising the reality of who these people are, without nasty sexist comments about cosmetic surgery and the like.
I see you’re serving Seared Red Herring today?
The issue isn’t, really, whether the McCain campaign owes the Food Network damages. It’s that they ripped off recipes that have nothing to do with anything Cindy McCain’s ever done, in order to project the folksy housewife image.
Well I, for one, have handed-down family recipes. Although I don’t use them much. I cook with wild abandon and cannot bothered to use actual recipes at all most of the time. (In my head, most of my recipes look pretty much like this: two handfuls of some kind of starchy food and about a cup of random chopped vegetables per person; add soy sauce, spaghetti sauce, or hot sauce to taste.)
As for Cindy McCain, well, I agree that it’s not totally implausible that the food network recipes really are her favorites. It still would have been better to link rather than copy. And I’m a bit curious about who out there actually cares about favorite recipes of potential presidents’ spouses.
I’m a bit curious about who out there actually cares about favorite recipes of potential presidents’ spouses.
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Nobody forced the McCain campaign people to put up Mrs. McCain’s supposedly-favorite recipes, just as nobody forced them to delegate the job to, supposedly, an intern, who was not forced to plagiarize them.
The McCain campaign people cared, and apparently they did this stuff this way because this is the way they do stuff they care about.
The Cindy money has a mafia history….her father was an employee of Kemper Marley, a liquor distributor in Phoenix. Marley was one of the mafia bosses in Las Vegas/Phoenix.
Hensley took the fall for Marley and did some time in prison for illegal liquor sales. When he got out, Marley rewarded him with the beer distributorship. There was also some mafia involvement in the purchase of Ruidoso Race Track in N.M.
A reporter investigating Marley was killed by a car bomb, and his last words implicated the sydicate who owned Ruidoso. Marley also put out a contract on the AG Babbitt.
So, Cindy is a daughter of the mob. McCain was supported by this dirty money in Arizona, to the effect that all employees of the Bud company were ‘encouraged’ to ’support’ McCain. Everyone of a certain age in Arizona knows this story. teh google will tell you more.
What is the statute of limitations on mafia money? No wonder she wants to ‘protect her children’ by not releasing her tax returns.
Having recently given a professional presentation on online copyright issues, I can say with certainty that yes, it is about the copyright infringement. Like or loathe the DMCA, what the McCain campaign did here is a clear violation of it, and the Food Network would’ve been within their rights to issue a take-down order to the campaign. Frankly, they would’ve been within their rights to do so even if the recipes had been attributed to the Food Network—just reprinting without permission is a DMCA violation.
Now, whether FN would’ve done so depends on whether (a) they got wind of it; (b) they decided it hurt the market value of those recipes; or (c) who knows? They might’ve given it a pass if the network execs were McCain supporters.
And while a random list of ingredients cannot be copyrighted, a recipe certainly can. Technically, anything published without an explicit copyright notice before 1989 is in the public domain; anything published since is copyrighted—even if it doesn’t have a copyright notice. So, great-great-Grandma’s apple pie recipe may be in the public domain if it’s her original recipe; if she got it from a recipe book and didn’t alter it, it’s likely copyrighted … but the likelihood of your getting busted for handing that recipe around to friends is pretty darn low. (If you reprint it online, the likelihood increases a little.)
Me? Like most people here, most of my recipes come from the Web, or from Cooking Light magazine. I don’t really make any family recipes from my side because my mother … wasn’t a great cook. I do make a pumpkin bread recipe that I got from MIL, which has been passed through a few generations from some forgotten cookbook. I’ve tinkered with the spices, though, so I think my version counts as a derivative work now.
As for why this matters, I’ll quote Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog:
“Nobody forced the McCain campaign people to put up Mrs. McCain’s supposedly-favorite recipes, just as nobody forced them to delegate the job to, supposedly, an intern, who was not forced to plagiarize them.
The McCain campaign people cared, and apparently they did this stuff this way because this is the way they do stuff they care about.”