Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

Missy Chase Lapine

The author of The Sneaky Chef thinks Jerry Seinfeld’s wife could be hiding something, said Deirdre Donahue in USA Today. One week after Jessica Seinfeld’s book on tricking children into eating nutritiously, Deceptively Delicious, rocketed to No. 1 on various best-seller lists, Missy Chase Lapine started telling reporters that many of Seinfeld’s recipe ideas sounded suspiciously familiar. Tricking your children by mixing avocado into their chocolate pudding? Lapine’s The Sneaky Chef promoted the same concoction six months ago. Adding puréed spinach to their brownies? Ditto. “There are at least 15 of my recipes that ended up in her book,” Lapine says. The self-described “mompreneur” wouldn’t comment on whether she’s considering legal action against Seinfeld’s publisher, HarperCollins, which rejected Lapine’s cookbook proposal last year. But she admits to being “concerned and troubled” that Seinfeld was welcomed as a culinary pioneer in an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Lapine doesn’t exactly have a patent on these recipes herself, said Motoko Rich in The New York Times. “Parents have been swapping tips for how to hide zucchini in muffins for generations.” Seinfeld herself, who denies that she stole from Lapine, notes that neither of them invented puréeing. In the end, Lapine might even benefit from Seinfeld’s runaway success, said Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in The Wall Street Journal. Bookstores across the country have temporarily run out of copies of Deceptively Delicious. The Sneaky Chef is suffering no such shortfall.