RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi ignited a furore when she called out fellow author Brooke Bellamy. But experts are doubtful of unique recipe origin stories.
If Picasso’s oil paintings can be faked and musical artists from Led Zeppelin to Oasis have fielded accusations of song swiping, what hope is there for the humble – and ubiquitous – caramel slice?
Recipe author Nagi Maehashi has called out Penguin books and author Brooke Bellamy for sweet treat recipes in bestselling Baking with Brooki that are very similar to those published on Maehashi’s RecipeTin Eats website.
Bellamy strenuously denied the claims in a story on her Instagram. “I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years,” she wrote. “In 2016, I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016.“
What actually is permissible when it comes to cooking instructions?
Cookbook author Adam Liaw has a background as an intellectual property lawyer. “There’s the legal side and there’s what is accepted within any creative discipline,” he says.
“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.”
He’s doubtful of unique recipe origin stories. “There is no Mr Bolognese in Bologna, everything is built on what came before. Food is a collective endeavour.”
Liaw is no stranger to having other people pass his recipes off as their own. “It used to happen to me a lot when I did YouTube,” he says. “I’d make something I’d been cooking since I was a child and suddenly there would be 10 other YouTubers making the exact recipe with the exact ingredients. I wouldn’t get too worried about it: if someone wants to take a specific number of grams from a recipe I wrote, then fine, be my guest.”
“There are millions of recipes out there. If I am going to write the same thing as anybody else, there’s not much point in me doing it.”
Adam Liaw
At the same time, he is clear about his role. “My job as recipe writer is to bring something new to the table,” he says. “There are millions of recipes out there. If I am going to write the same thing as anybody else, there’s not much point in me doing it. I might take a classic dish and look at a way to make it faster or cheaper or to use a new ingredient, something to make it my own.”
To ensure it is original, he doesn’t read other author’s cookbooks or look at their recipes online. “You might not do it deliberately, but there is the danger of subconsciously encroaching on someone’s territory.”
Simon Davis, food and lifestyle publisher at Hardie Grant, believes the onus is on publishers to ensure they are releasing original content. “We supply authors with guidelines not to replicate, we spot check manuscripts against recipes on the internet, and there are lots of places during the editing process where a flag can be raised,” he says. When an author has taken inspiration from someone else, they are expected to credit it. He reserves a particular horror for plagiarised recipe introductions. “If someone copies the inspiration behind a recipe, that’s bad on so many levels.”
Food presenter and cookbook author Alice Zaslavsky notes the challenges of being original in baking recipes. “It’s about precision: there are only so many ways you can bake a pound cake or an Anzac biscuit, but that doesn’t mean you can crib when you’re developing recipes,” she says. “With savouries, there are many more ways to skin a cat.”
Zaslavsky is big on attribution. “I love that Nigella cures her eggs by putting vinegar or lemon juice in the poaching liquid. I use that method in my book In Praise of Veg and attribute it in the recipe introduction.” In general, she aims to bring her own values and goals to a recipe. “Are we thinking about saving time, saving money? All those things inform the steps and the ingredients you include.”
In an age of limitless content, recipes are one way that people connect, pan-to-pan, spoon-to-spoon, heart-to-heart. “The recipes an author puts in a cookbook are deeply personal,” she says. “They are not just about the steps, they are about the lived experience and the memories that bring the writer to that point. That is personal, it can only come – should only come – from you.”
