Nagi Maehashi and Brooke Bellamy to face-off at Award's Night
Hours after RecipeTin Eats founder Maehashi accused Bellamy's book publisher Penguin Random House of copyright infringement allegations, a publishing storm erupted over who owned the rights to two recipes, one for caramel slice, the other for European classic baklava.
What Maehashi would later call a simple 'business dispute' others claimed was a more strategic strike against an online rival whose cookbook, Bake with Brooki, has been nominated against Maehashi's own cookbook, Tonight with Nagi Maehashi, at next week's Australian Book Industry Awards.
By Thursday night the temperature on the stoush had dropped to a simmer when Maehashi posted an appeal for calm to Instagram, which had the effect of restoking media interest. She has 1.6 million of them on Instagram and 3.8 million of them on Facebook – an army.
'Please stop the trolling. Now I know I've made serious allegations but this does not justify the personal attacks that I've seen online against Brooke Bellamy. I do not support it and I'm asking you to stop,' Maehashi posted on Thursday.
'Fundamentally at the end of the day we're talking recipes and this is a business dispute. These are allegations I have made against Penguin, a corporate. Allegations made by my company. so we've gotta be respectful about this. It's the RecipeTin way.'
By Friday 'the RecipeTin way' was also under attack after Maehashi's critics pointed out the businesswoman, a graduate of academically selective North Sydney Girls High who has a Bachelor of Commerce from UTS, had spent 17 years in corporate finance before starting her online food blog in 2012 and knows a thing or two about the rules of engagement in a corporate war.
From the RecipeTins' founder's left flank had emerged a new force – rival chefs and publishers quick to point out Maehashi's own business model is built on her modification of other people's recipes.
Luke Mangan's butter chicken, Matt Moran's pork tenderloin with creamy marsala sauce and Thai beef curry (which he credits inspiration to Indigenous actor Meyne Wyatt), Nigel Slater's creamy chicken in white wine sauce, Yotam Ottolenghi's cauliflower salad, his middle eastern chickpea salad, his green bean salad, his roasted broccolini with tahini sauce, Jamie Oliver's chicken milk seriously delish, Nigella Lawson's noodle salad with creamy sesame peanut dressing, and so it goes.
Surely Maehashi sees how fraught it can be to call out others over similar recipes.
This week Mangan revealed he was peeved Maehashi, who provided a footnote acknowledging his involvement online for his butter chicken recipe but not in her printed book, hadn't provided a link to his website.
Maehashi's book features the disclaimer that efforts were made to contact copyright holders.
Mangan's statement hinted he felt the blogger might not have tried that hard.
Celebrity cook Adam Liaw, who has a background as an intellectual property lawyer, scoffed at the suggestion you could own a recipe.
'Copyright doesn't protect the recipe itself. It protects the publication of the exact same written form of that recipe,' he told media. 'There is no Mr Bolognese in Bologna, everything is built on what came before. Food is a collective endeavour.'
From the RecipeTin Eats' founder's right flank on Friday emerged a new threat – search engine optimisation specialists eager to point out Maehashi's success lies not in the online publication of recipes or in the recipes themselves, not even in her cute pictures of her romping in her garden with her golden retriever Dozer, but in her canny talent for adding instructions to her recipes that optimises her content online and lands her at the top of Google's search engine.
'She's almost always at the top of a Google search for a commonly searched for recipe,' said one, 'and that's where she makes her real money.'
While Maehashi's recipes are free to her platform followers, the ads embedded in her posts are generating a fortune which helped pay for a $7 million home in Hunter's Hill in 2023, which she swiftly returned to market the following year – $420,000 in stamp duty be damned.
Meanwhile, having denied Maehashi's allegations of plagiarising her caramel slice and baklava recipes, Bellamy, who is pregnant, has retreated to take care of her young family and business.
'The past 24 hours have been extremely overwhelming,' she said in a statement.
'I have had media outside my home and business and have been attacked online. It has been deeply distressing for my colleagues and my young family.
'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.
'My priority right now is to ensure the welfare of the fantastic team at Brooki Bakehouse and that of my family.'
Penguin is standing by Bellamy, say sources.
Perhaps if Maehashi hopes to calm the matter, she could start by taking down her original April 29 Facebook post, which by Friday had 1.2k comments and been shared 900 times.
Footnote: A quick search reveals the caramel slice has been around for decades and has its origins in Scotland's shortbread biscuit created in the 12th century, though the caramel and chocolate layers appear to have been added a mere 50 years ago. It first appeared in its present form in an Australian Women's Weekly cookbook in the eighties. Baklava is more ancient and has its origins either in ancient Rome or Greece or the 8th century cookhouses of the Assyrians of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Kuwait and Turkey, a people you'd only accuse of plagiarism at your own risk. How times have changed.
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