Just days before their titles go head to head in an industry award, Australia’s bestselling cookbook author, Nagi Maehashi, has accused one of the country’s next bestsellers, Brooke Bellamy, of plagiarism. Ordinarily claims of literary theft would be fairly straightforward, but in recipe writing, allegations are far less clear cut. After all, there are only so many ways you can bake a cake – or in this case, baklava and caramel slice.
In a blog entry on Tuesday, Maehashi alleged Bellamy had taken substantially from two free recipes posted to Maehashi’s website RecipeTin Eats. A day later, on Instagram, American cookery author Sally McKenney also alleged Bellamy had copied one of her recipes – The Best Vanilla Cake I’ve Ever Had.
Bellamy denied the accusations, saying she had been making and selling her recipes before Maehashi’s were published.
On Thursday, in an interview with Good Food, where Maehashi is a columnist, the RecipeTin Eats: Tonight author alleged Bellamy’s recipe for Portuguese custard tarts was copied “virtually word for word” from Bill Granger’s 2006 cookbook Every Day. Granger was a beloved figure in Australia’s food scene who died in December 2023.
Bellamy’s career has taken off quickly. She launched her Brisbane-based bakery delivery service Brooki Bakehouse in 2022. From there she amassed 2 million followers on TikTok, where she posts videos of herself baking cookies and decorating cakes in her pink-tiled commercial kitchen.
Bellamy’s first cookbook Bake with Brooki came out in October 2024, and was second only to Maehashi’s cookbook on Australia’s Christmas bestseller list last year.
The reprisal against Bellamy since Maehashi published her accusation has been swift and brutal. Maehashi has a large and passionate fan community who have sent Bellamy’s Goodreads review scores plummeting. On Reddit at least a dozen threads, with hundreds of comments, have sprung up on the issue. There users speculate not just on the plagiarism but on Bellamy’s personal life.
Bellamy has lost an ambassador role with an organisation encouraging young girls into entrepreneurship, Brooki Bakehouse staff have been photographed outside their workplace, and Bellamy’s lawyers issued a statement that said: “It would be appreciated if media outlets could, at the very least, refrain from further attempted door stops at her family home.”
Everyone agrees there is no such thing as a wholly original recipe. Just how unoriginal a recipe must be before its reuse constitutes an ethical breach, let alone a legal one, is significantly more contentious.
Intellectual property barrister Frances St John says anything that is written down in Australia is theoretically protected by copyright but sometimes that protection is “thin”.
“If you’ve got two pages of a completely original short story, it’s going to be easier to prove that copyright subsists, and that it has been infringed, than if you’ve got two pages of something factual, such as steps in how to use a certain computer tool,” St John says.
Adam Liaw, who worked as an intellectual property lawyer before becoming a cookery show host and recipe writer, says: “There are very few recipe writers in the world who can claim to have created something truly unique or truly innovative, that has never been done by anyone before.”
He says there’s a folk myth among recipe developers: in order for a dish to be considered new, you have to change three ingredients. “There’s no such rule in intellectual property at all.”
In her blog post outlining the dispute, Maehashi shows side-by-side ingredient lists from her own recipes, and those published in Bellamy’s book Bake with Brooki. These lists are identical, down to the gram.
Liaw says it is entirely plausible this could be coincidence. “If you’re writing a recipe that’s got flour in it, ideally for ease of use, you want those measurements to be round.” Calling for a hard-to-measure fraction – say a cup of flour plus five grams – is “going to be a pain for everyone”.
Pamela Clark, who worked in the test kitchen of the Australian Women’s Weekly for 50 years, agrees. When her team “were using a recipe that was already known to gazillions of people”, they would call it a “classic” or a “favourite”. Drawing attention to a recipe’s known status “was the philosophy that we took on so that people couldn’t really say, ‘well, you’ve stolen’,” she says.
When it comes to the method, Liaw and Clark’s opinions differ.
“There are only so many methods for doing something,” says Liaw. “Nobody’s whisking an egg a different way, or combining their ingredients in a different order because there is an accepted process for how you combine.”
But Clark says cookery writers “have their own style of writing a method”. Food editors and writers “like to put their own stamp” on teaching people how to cook. Oven temperature, whether or not to stand a cake, or the type of pan suggested all have significant scope for variation, Clark says.
The similarity between not just ingredients, but methods, forms a substantial part of Maehashi’s plagiarism allegations. Maehashi’s and Bellamy’s baklava recipes, for instance, call for the same oven temperature, cooking times, number of layers of filo and simmering time for the syrup.
McKenney and Bellamy’s vanilla cake recipes differ more. McKenney suggests baking the cakes for 23 to 26 minutes, while Bellamy’s recipe, which uses a different oven temperature and pan size, calls for 24-26 minutes of baking.
Bellamy denies McKenney’s and Maehashi’s allegations. “I do not copy other people’s recipes,” she said in a statement. “Like many bakers, I draw inspiration from the classics, but the creations you see at Brooki Bakehouse reflect my own experience, taste, and passion for baking, born of countless hours of my childhood spent in my home kitchen with Mum.
“While baking has leeway for creativity, much of it is a precise science and is necessarily formulaic. Many recipes are bound to share common steps and measures: if they don’t, they simply don’t work.”
Although many of the recipes in Bake with Brooki are adapted versions of the cookies and cakes Bellamy sells at Brooki’s Bakehouse, not all 100 of the desserts in the book have appeared on Bellamy’s Bakehouse menu.
“I would say there’s no doubt that a recipe can be protected as a literary work under the Copyright Act,” St John says. “That’s not to say every recipe would be, but certainly some would.”
Copyright infringement cases are “a matter of fact and degree”, she says.
Speaking generally, not about the Maehashi matter specifically, St John says that if an infringer has acted deceptively it could be a breach of a different type of copyright right altogether – moral rights. “In Australia, authors have a ‘moral right’ not to have their work used without attribution ... Moral rights cases are rare, but not unheard of,” St John says.
There’s one more aspect of copyright law St John believes could be relevant: causal connection. “In a recipe case, if the original author can show (usually by discovery) that the alleged copier looked at the recipe online before drafting their own recipe, that would be a causal connection, which would help to prove that infringement had occurred.”
St John says she is not aware of any case about recipes appearing in Australia’s courts.
Maehashi says she contacted Bellamy’s publisher Penguin several months before deciding to make her allegations public.
Now, Maehashi has engaged her own legal counsel, Adam Simpson. His law firm Simpsons sponsors the Australian Book Industry awards (Abias), where Maehashi and Bellamy are both nominated, but are not involved in judging the awards.
In her blog post, Maehashi states she would have been happy to have her recipes republished with attribution. In a section of the post worded directly to Bellamy, she said: “It didn’t have to be like this. If you had asked for permission, I would have given it and, knowing me, proudly promoted your book on launch. It costs nothing to credit.”
Alice Zaslavsky, whose book Salad for Days is nominated in the same category as Maehashi’s and Bellamy’s titles at the Abias, says attribution has become a standard element of modern recipe writing.
“In music there’s profit share if you’ve sampled [someone else’s track], but in recipes there’s no framework,” Zasalvsky says. “It’s not like Belinda Jeffery gets a cut every time someone makes a version of her coconut almond cake. The only way that you can offer some level of recompense is through referencing, attribution and honouring the story behind it.”
Bellamy’s publisher, Penguin, has has not replied to Guardian Australia’s request for comment.
Those in the industry suspect corner cutting and borrowing likely happens fairly frequently, and that when a recipe is reused from a classic cookbook, not a modern blog, it would be almost impossible to catch it. It is also unlikely that Australian publishing houses, even the large ones, have the resources to check every recipe in a book for copying.
Liaw believes new recipes need to have “a reason to exist”. Is there something you can change that makes it “cheaper or easier, or taste better or use fewer ingredients?”
Clark says when the Women’s Weekly kitchen would test, adapt and change a classic recipe to make it better, they would always point to what they had improved, often calling these recipes “the best ever”.
Sometimes up to eight staffers might work on a single recipe. She and her testers would push the barriers of the basics, changing a butter cake from “say, half a cup of sugar, right up to maybe a cup and a quarter of sugar, which is a lot, a big increase, but it changes the texture dramatically”. When that happens, “then it does definitely become your own recipe”.
Maehashi works similarly to the Australian Women’s Weekly. She is known for her recipe testing and her methodical process is what has earned her such an ardent fan following. When you cook a dish from RecipeTinEats, you know it is going to work. But this kind of labour over the classics is especially hard to assert ownership over.
Two days after making her initial allegation, Maehashi made a post titled “Reminder” on Instagram stories. “I did not make the statement lightly and without doing serious groundwork,” she said. “I also did it knowing it would open the floodgates to haters, and no control over what the press will say.”
She also posted a video beseeching her audience to stop trolling Bellamy. “I know I’ve made serious allegations, but this does not justify the personal attacks I’ve seen online against Brooke Bellamy,” she said. “I’m asking you to stop.”
“Share your opinions, have a heated debate, support Brooki, support me, disagree with both of us, think we’re pathetic, whatever you want … but keep it respectful.”
