[thebenedict]

That means that legally, you could buy a ton of recipe books, and then make your own by copying and pasting just the ones you like. You could use the recipes unchanged...

At the scale of Google Books, we're not talking about using copyrighted recipes unchanged or copying and pasting. If you buy a ton of cookbooks, scan them, make them searchable by the world and derive new information about cooking from analyzing them, can you profit from the derived knowledge? Should that change if the publisher or author made an active decision not to make their content available electronically, or asked you to exclude them from your analysis?

[vanniv]

In theory, if you stripped out absolutely all of the content except for the bare ingredients-list-and-procedures of the recipes (possibly you would also have to drop the names), you could make a recipe book called "all of the recipes ever published in any of the 140 most popular languages" and you'd be fine.

You could then make your recipe book searchable, sure.