IANAL but wouldn't you just get a copyright on the story and somebody could still extract all the necessary information for preparing the meal and publish it as a simple recipe?
IANAL either, but I believe that, yes, you could do just that. Of course you'd not have any copyright... :)
TBH I'm not entirely clear why the issue is so important to the people who publish these things, but clearly it is!
Why would they care about copyright? The sites these recipes sit on are ad-funded. Copyright would matter if they were selling these as books, not for free online where anybody can copy it, save it as a PDF etc.