[chef] Including other recipes ... why the alternate format/method?

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Greetings,

I am looking at a recipe for installing tomcat and happened across this line
(with associated comment):

   # required for the secure_password method from the openssl cookbook
   ::Chef::Recipe.send(:include, Opscode::OpenSSL::Password)

I was wondering why the author would choose to use this alternate way of
including a recipe. Why would they not just do something like: include_recipe
'X::Password'.

Is this not doing exactly that, simply including another recipe? If so, then
why choose the more difficult to read/maintain/etc way of doing it?

Thanks in advance for the insight!