The Hill reported on Wednesday that Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky who seeks to defeat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the 2014 general election, has something in common with Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. Both appear to have passed off cookbook recipes from others as their own.
For Elizabeth Warren, the cooking controversy started in 2012 with the infamous Pow Wow Chow Cookbook, where she took recipes found in a New York Times cookbook and claimed they were recipes from her family’s non-existent Cherokee Native American branch.
For Lundergan Grimes, the old fashioned recipe “borrowing” began on her campaign website and Facebook page. Her campaign website lists two recipes, one for cranberry-pineapple salad and one for sweet potato casserole, on a page titled “Our Family Recipes.”
According to The Hill, the cranberry-pineapple salad recipe “is a near-exact copy of a Kraft recipe for “Festive Cranberry-Pineapple Salad,” as posted to the Motley Recipe Book blog in 2006. Lundergan Grimes’ recipe swaps pecans for walnuts and eliminates some of the specificity of the recipe on the blog.”
The Hill also reports that the sweet potato casserole recipe “also tracks closely with the measurements and directions for a sweet potato casserole posted on the website of the Hartzler Family Dairy in Wooster, Ohio. . . Lundergan Grimes’ recipe swaps yams for sweet potatoes, generic butter for Hartzler brand and suggests baking, rather than boiling, the potatoes.”
According to The Hill, “Charly Norton, a spokeswoman for Lundergan Grimes’ campaign, offered no explanation for the similarities but said they were recipes that the candidate’s grandmother Elsie — a surrogate for the candidate who often appears on the campaign trail with her — made for the family.”
The Hill quoted Ms. Norton that “Elsie has been making those for her family for years, so Alison thought it would be nice to share them on her Facebook.”
As far as we know, Ms. Grimes has not claimed that any of her recipes have been passed down in the family from non-existent Cherokee ancestors.
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