Jessica Seinfeld appeared on The View today, and she answered Barbara Walters question about whether she plagiarized Missy Chase Lapine’s book, The Sneaky Chef, by immediately launching into a diatribe about how people are jealous of the success of her book and “must be looking for cracks” to exploit.

Seinfeld came out with a book called Deceptively Delicious this fall about sneaking vegetables into your kids food by pureeing them up. It was a huge success thanks to Oprah, who featured Seinfeld and her duplicitous recipes on her show this October. Seinfeld has a marketing background and no experience as a chef. Missy Chase Lapine, the author of the earlier book The Sneaky Chef, which is suspiciously similar in both concept and content to Seinfeld’s book, is a chef on the faculty of The New School in NY City

When addressing the plagiarism charge on The View, Seinfeld appeared defensive and annoyed, like she was trying to hold back her feelings. After explaining that people try to cut you down when you’re successful, she quickly added while gesturing wildly with her hands that “I never saw her book, I never saw her recipes.”

Barbara Walters - “There were those who said you copied [the Sneaky Chef] so that must have been very upsetting.”

Jessica Seinfeld - “Well, I can understand why she would have been upset.

You know, first of all when you have a huge success, you know this, people tend to look for the cracks, look for anything that could break you down a little bit. You know there’s always a negative when there’s a positive. This was such an immediate success, this book, that I think that probably people were looking for things to pick apart. But anyway I can understand why she would have been frustrated. She did a book with a similar topic a few months earlier and, you know, it must have been hard to see how quickly my book took off.

(Gestures wildly) I never saw her book, I never saw her recipes nor as a person would I ever do something like I was accused of doing, but you know what ..”

Sheri - “You just got three kids and you were trying to get them to eat their vegetables”

Jessica - “I really didn’t have to do this book, it was something I really wanted to do, and I really wanted… ”

Barbara - “As we said you didn’t exactly need it to feed the family.”

Jessica - “No, we’re doing alright. (Laughs)

[Transcribed from The View video segment available on the Huffington Post and shown below]

So instead of acknowledging Lapine’s case against her, which is incredibly strong, Seinfeld simply said she must be jealous. Her husband responded earlier to the plagiarism allegations in an appearance on David Letterman by calling Lapine a “wacko.”

The two books are not only similar in their idea of getting kids to eat vegetables by working them into foods they will eat, like adding cauliflower to mashed potatoes, they include remarkably similar food combinations and even some suspect wording. The NY Daily News noted how similar the recipes really were:

Seinfeld writes about having an epiphany that, “While I was cooking dinner, pureeing butternut squash for the baby and making mac and cheese for the rest of us, I had the crazy idea of stirring a little of the puree into the macaroni. … The colors matched -you couldn’t really see the squash in there -and the texture was perfect.”

Lapine, who founded the Baby Spa natural products line, writes: “If you want to hide something in macaroni and cheese, you have to match the color of the dish. You could easily introduce white bean puree in the mac and cheese.”

Seinfeld and Lapine both have recipes for mashed potatoes with hidden cauliflower, grilled cheese with secret sweet potatoes, green eggs made with pureed baby spinach, and carrot-laced tacos.

[From The NY Daily News]

I’ve already written about this, but there’s no way all those same recipes are a coincidence. One or two might be explained away by similar thinking, but four recipes that are nearly the same?

Jessica Seinfeld told The Wall St. Journal when the allegations first came out that “I’ve never held that book in my hands, and I swear that on my life.” That’s quite different from saying she’s never seen it.

There’s no official lawsuit against Seinfeld yet, but I hope that she gets the pants sued off of her.

Jessica Seinfeld is shown on 11/15/07 at the “7th On Sale” Black Tie Gala, thanks to PR Photos.

Here’s the video, thanks to The Huffington Post: