Many, perhaps most, recipes have no copyright protection at all. More specifically, the list of ingredients, and the steps to follow are all facts, and as such are not protected by copyright. Elaborations and creative wording of the directions, and discussion of the reasons for the steps, or of the effect of the steps, is likely to be protected, and may not be copied without permission, unless an exception to copyright applies.
In US law, 17 USC 102(b) provides that:
(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
The US Copyright Office Circular #33: "Works Not Protected
by Copyright" states on page 2:
Recipes
A recipe is a statement of the ingredients and procedure required for making a dish of food. A mere listing of ingredients or contents, or a simple set of directions, is uncopyrightable. As a result, the Office cannot register recipes consisting of a set of ingredients and a process for preparing a dish. In contrast, a recipe that creatively explains or depicts how or why to perform a particular activity may be copyrightable. A registration for a recipe may cover the written description or explanation of a process that appears in the work, as well as any photographs or illustrations that are owned by the applicant. However, the registration will not cover the list of ingredients that appear in each recipe,
the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself. The registration will also not cover the activities described in the work that are procedures, processes, or methods of operation, which are not subject to copyright protection.
The law in other countries is similar on this point.,
Thus, a video showing the preparation of a dish following a copyrighted recipe is not a copyright infringement, and no permission from the copyright owner is required. Indeed legally even attribution is not required, although many would hold that it is ethically essential. Reading the text of the recipe aloud during the video, or displaying the text of the recipe, might be an infringement if the text includes protectable expression, as it might well do. Permission might be required to read or display the text.
Original discussion of the recipe, its merits and problems, and its relation to other recipes, would not be an infringement, and no permission would be needed for such discussion.
Non-US Law
"Protection of a recipe" an article on Copyright.EU says:
... it has been recognised that cooking recipes cannot be protected by copyright since they “do not in themselves constitute an intellectual work”, but rather a know-how, which is similar to an idea (TGI Paris, 10 July 1974).
On the other hand, the text of a recipe could be protected if it is original. But this protection is not sufficient since it does not concern the content of the recipe: it focuses on the form of the recipe text.
The article "Intellectual Property Rights in Recipes and Food" by Bird & Bird states:
Whilst a recipe could constitute a literary work for the purposes of the [UK] CDPA 1988, this would only protect the written recipe itself from being republished and it would not prohibit someone from following the recipe and making the dish (in other words, the manifestation of the recipe is not infringement).
The article "Protecting recipes using intellectual property law" states:
In theory, a recipe should be able to benefit from this protection. However, French and European case law has long refused to grant copyright protection to recipes. In a judgment dated 30 September 1997, the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris considered that “although recipes may be protected in their literary expression, they do not in themselves constitute a work of the mind.” It is therefore possible to obtain protection for the text of the recipe if it is original, for example for a cookery book, but not for the recipe as such.
