Recipe sites seem to think so, as they include a multi-page backstory about how the recipe was handed down from someone's grandmother and all the notable people she prepared it for. Oh and please buy our kitchen gadgets.

I would say so (not the same as a recipe). In this way a recipe and the ten commandments look the same. Reductionist comparisons are pretty easy to make. Sometimes code and recipes look the same, if the codebase is small enough and both omit the deployment/build chain/tooling in favor of implied requirements.

What's the difference between what is literature and what is not literature then?

I realize I was taking for granted what literature was?

(I have an idea but I will add it later)

As far as I can tell, literature is a form of explicit communication to the naive reader, which intrinsically provides context to interpret it.

The README is literature. The code is not (common case). A cipher is not literature, even if that cipher is breakable, resulting in literature. It may be useful to consider it literature if you know the cipher, but it is not until that transformation has occurred. You may recognize this if you try to read a story written by a child or mentally disturbed individual. The story might skip or be interrupted/incomplete or is otherwise nonsensically mangled structurally and narratively. Literature implies literacy to access the medium both ways (reader and author). Broken manuscripts are not literature, per se.

Literature is a soft term, so what I think holds no value other than how it might well describe the populist zeitgeist surrounding the term.

So literature is a communication form while code is information (i.e. What's being communicated)?

Makes sense.