A recipe is not copyrightable, so if they just directly presented the recipe to you in a convenient format then someone could copy that recipe for their own sit

A recipe is not copyrightable, so if they just directly presented the recipe to you in a convenient format then someone could copy that recipe for their own site (either manually or automatically scaped). By mixing it up annoyingly with a story it becomes copyrighted. If you still have the recipe in a useful format after the story then it would still be possible to manually copy just that part, but at least you've made it harder for someone to scrape it.