@samir wait, I thought the "recipe sites full of waffle" thing was a sign of broken copyright, not broken Google.

If I just post a recipe online, it's not protected by copyright – neither a list of ingredients nor a list of instructions are copyrightable.

But if I write six pages of creative bollocks about how delicious this particular cake is, you can't legally rip off the recipe because it's now part of a creative work.