After scrounging the net for several minutes, the apprentice offers this...

This article provides an interesting overview to the questions used to determine "fair use."

Interestingly enough, the O'Reilly web site contains an overview in their writer's guidelines.

Based on these, other sources, and my previous experience, I believe quoting from a Recipe is fine, provided you a) keep it reasonably limited, b) provide complete attribution (title, author, publisher, and ISBN), c) aren't competing with the publisher (e.g. charging for it), and c) don't try to pass it off as your own work (unless, of course, it _is_ your own work).

Mind you, I'm not a lawyer and there are a number of ways you can interpret these two documents, but if you read some of opinions issued in cases involving the Fair Use doctrine, it pretty much boils down to giving credit where credit is due and not competing with the original publisher/author.

--f

P.S. I'm currently digging a little deeper into this; I'll update when I have more information.