Who owns a recipe? Yesterday, the McCain campaign Web site had to dismantle its “Cindy’s Recipes” page after the Huffington Post revealed that the recipes were not lovingly created by Cindy McCain, so much as clumsily copied from the Food Network.

One of those recipes, for a passionfruit mousse, was one that I wrote for pastry chef Gale Gand in 2003; we collaborated on four books together, writing literally hundreds of recipes. Recipes went from her kitchen to my keyboard: she always developed the method, fine-tuned ingredients, decided whether dry ingredients should be added to wet or vice versa. I wrote the text in the most helpful language possible for home cooks and provided a pep talk in the form of a recipe headnote.

Was the passionfruit mousse hers, mine, or no one’s? In my mind, recipes always belong to chefs. (In Thomas Keller’s mind, too — cooks hired to work in his kitchens at Per Se and The French Laundry must sign a formal agreement not to reproduce any of his dishes.) Although I was one of the lucky writers, with my name on the cover and a copyright on the book, the recipes themselves were her intellectual property, and rightly so.

Dishes cannot be copyrighted. The fact is that many — think of onion soup, or yellow cake — are almost indistinguishable from one cookbook to the next. The Food Network claims copyright to the recipes on its website, even if that recipe has previously been published — and thus copyrighted — in a chef’s cookbook. And those chefs usually “copied” their own recipes, in some sense, from an instructor at culinary school, or from a mentor, or from their mothers.

(Or from themselves: Ms. Gand’s basic mousse method reappears in many different guises — mango, passionfruit, raspberry — throughout our books.)

When I worked as a cookbook editor, I learned that anyone might add 1/4 teaspoon of paprika, take away a garnish, reword a step and publish a recipe as their own. Apparently whoever posted the recipes on the McCain Web site couldn’t even be bothered to do that much tweaking.