[Eisenstein]

That makes no sense. The recipe is still a recipe. Surrounding it by text wouldn't make it something else. Like, taking a picture of a recipe would make you the owner of the copyright of the picture, but anyone could copy that recipe to another medium and distribute it. Likewise you can re-write the recipe part into a cookbook and publish that without violating the copyright. Putting your family story around it won't change that.

[genewitch]

copyright law doesn't have to make sense. a recipe isn't a creative work, it's a list of ingredients and potentially the mechanics of putting them together. The actual recipe cannot be copyrighted. There are a lot of articles that are factchecked with a search for "recipe copyright". The rule of thumb is what i stated, in order to protect one's work on recipes or a compilation of said, one has to insert prose and other media.

Anyhow the main point is that recipe sites being the way they are has nothing to do with SEO, it's the "generally accepted practice" of protecting your work.