Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, has stepped into a storm of controversy after it came to the fore that she might have plagiarized recipes for her book Deceptively Delicious from lesser know Missy Chase Lapine, author of The Sneaky Chef published six months earlier.
Deceptively Delicious had reached No. 2 on the USA TODAY’s Best Sellers list after Oprah punted the book on her show. There are over 1.2 million copies that have made it to print while Lapine has only sold 150,000 copies.
Lapine said that there are at least 15 of her recipes that ended up in Jessica Seinfeld cookbook, but she said that it is hard to protect her recipes if one ingredient is changed.
She also explained that a promotional brochure for Deceptively Delicious had said the word ‘sneaky’ and was changed to ‘simple’ because her publisher had contacted HarperCollins. (The publisher of Seinfeld’s book)
Jessica Seinfeld however is having none of it and is saying that her book took years to put together and is a product of getting her own kids to eat more healthily.
If the book turns out to be plagiarized, it would not be the first time Oprah had been duped. Last year she sent sales of James Frey’s book soaring only to find out he had made up most of the supposedly true story.