Thieves in the Kitchen: The Stealing of Recipes

Recipe author Nagi Maehashi, unmoved by her own numbing banality, is peeved. Her target: Penguin books and author Brooke Bellamy. Her accusation: the apparent copying of recipes for caramel slice and baklava from Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats website, released in Bellamy’s Bake with Brooki, published in October last year. “Profiting from plagiarised recipes is unethical,” she huffed, “even if it is not copyright infringement – and undermines the integrity of the entire book.” Rather indulgently, Maehashi goes on to decry this as a “slap in the face to every author who puts in the hard work to create original content rather than cutting corners.” The question left begging is whether this is ever possible for a cookbook.

Bellamy, who has the combined weight of 3 million followers on TikTok and Instagram, has flatly denied the accusation. “I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years,” she claims on Instagram. “In 2016, I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016.” The social media figure is candid in admitting that she did not invent any of the recipes listed in her book dealing with cookies, cupcakes, brownies or cakes.

On the issue of the caramel slice, Bellamy merely observes that the RecipeTin Eats recipe, published in March 2020, “uses the same ingredients as my recipe, which I have been making and selling since four years prior.” Evidently not a pugilist, Bellamy has even offered to remove the caramel slice and baklava recipes from any future reprints of her book, a point “communicated to Nagi swiftly through discussions.”

Another author from cookbook land, Adam Liaw, abandons his kitchen implements briefly to explain the finer points of intellectual property in light of this dispute. As an intellectual property lawyer in his previous non-cooking life, he suggests that the copyright “doesn’t protect the recipe itself. It protects the publication of the exact same written form of that recipe. None of the recipes written in the world would reach the standards necessary to obtain patent protection.”

A closer look at the claim is one of plagiarism. This is an interesting point, given the multitude of borrowings, replications and, along the way, adjustments, that come along with the use of recipes. Professor John Swinson from the University of Queensland adds insult to injury to Maehashi’s case by simply stating that the steps involved in making the recipe were “not very expressive.” When looking at a comparison between the two recipes in question, one is left with a similar impression. “You can’t protect a cake or cookie,” Swinson clarifies. “You can only protect how it\s expressed, not the end result, and most recipes are just factual instructions.”

A sticking point here is the issue of attribution. Under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), there are various described moral rights, as distinct from economic rights. These include the right of attribution (that the author be identified and named as the author of that work); the right against false attribution (the right of the author to prevent someone else from being credited as the author of their work; and the right of integrity (the right of an author to ensure that the work is not subjected to derogatory treatment harmful to the author’s honour or reputation).

Historically speaking, the publication of recipes drawn from the vast archive of cookery is more than standard. We find Isabella Beeton in October 1861, a co-editor of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine pillaging at will any number of recipes for The Book of Household Management. As food boffin and author Helana Brigman points out, this book of revelation for Victorian readers, one that allayed fears about “how much should a family of five spend on groceries,” had nothing that was her own. In writing her book, Beeton made generous use of readers’ submissions.

The fact remains that, however murky one might assume the laws on copyright were on the subject, neither US nor British copyright laws (ditto Australia’s equivalent) protect a listing of ingredients, even those found in formulas, compounds, or prescriptions. Broadly speaking, claiming some ownership over a dish is much like asserting control over the air and its vapours.  

An iconoclastic Jonathan Meades takes the torch to such proprietary assertions in his The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime of Culinary Thefts. His work eschews “culinary originality,” being an “anti-cookbook” favouring “the daylight robbery of recipes, to hijacking techniques and methods, to the notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new.”  

Meades rightly notes that the pathology of originality arises from the emergence of the cult chef, the God creator in the kitchen. In an interview, he notes how it began “in upscale restaurants in Spain and then in Britain with Heston Blumenthal.”

The entire grievance on Maehashi’s part has given Bellamy even more oxygen for her enterprise, with the latter preferring to repair back to the bakery. Two new stores are set to open in Queensland in July. An international pop-up store in the United Arab Emirates is planned to open by the end of the year, adding to existing ones in the Middle East. If Bellamy was ever a thief in the kitchen, the enterprise is doing quite nicely.

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