Puester wrote:

> That recipe may have gone through a dozen people between your mother and
> the newsgroup. How can you possibly decide who to blame for the plagiarism?

Technically, he may be right. Many of these recipes have been in the
public domain for 500 years, but they were translated into Spanish from
the original Nahuatl, lost for 400 years and then translated into
English by more recent writers of copyrighted cookbooks.

If all readers of this NG would go out and acquire a few good
copyrighted cookbooks, they could avoid the endless trolling and flame
wars of Usenet and they would actually learn some of the basics of
Mexican cooking without encountering self-important people who enjoy
trying to dominate strangers on the internet.