A rising star was accused of cookbook plagiarism. But can you own a recipe?

Caramel, baklava and vanilla cake are not supposed to taste this sour. A rising star in the baking world has been accused of plagiarism for her version of three classic dishes in her first cookbook, sparking online outcry and raising questions about whether it’s possible to ever “own” a recipe.

The case is the latest copyright allegation in the food industry, where chefs and influencers tread a delicate line between blending the necessary steps to make food with innovations to create something to be repeated and shared.

The allegations

On Tuesday, Australian food writer Nagi Maehashi, of the popular food website RecipeTin Eats, accused bakery owner and influencer Brooke Bellamy of using two of her recipes—for caramel slice, a classic Australian recipe layering chocolate and caramel atop a biscuit base, and baklava—in her first cookbook, “Bake with Brooki.”

Maehashi, who has published two cookbooks, also accused Bellamy’s publisher, Penguin Random House Australia, of copyright infringement, and published side-by-side pictures of her and Bellamy’s recipes. The company’s lawyers rejected the allegations, Maehashi said. Neither Penguin Random House Australia, Maehashi nor Maehashi’s lawyers responded to requests for comment.

“This is a story about a multi-million dollar cookbook by a social media influencer, published by a blue-chip publisher, featuring numerous recipes that, in my opinion, are plagiarised, given the detailed and extensive word-for-word similarities to mine and those of other authors,” Maehashi wrote.

The plagiarism claims were echoed by U.S. baker Sally McKenney, author of Sally’s Baking Addiction, who wrote on Instagram that her vanilla cake recipe had been “plagiarized in this book.” Maehashi said she recognized McKenney’s cake because of its unusual use of buttermilk as an ingredient. McKenney did not respond to a request for comment.

Bellamy denied the allegations. “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,” she said in a statement Wednesday.

She added that she had been subject to online attacks since the allegations emerged.

“While baking has leeway for creativity, much of it is a precise science and is necessarily formulaic,” she said. “Many recipes are bound to share common steps and measures: if they don’t, they simply don’t work.” In a separate post on Instagram, she said she had offered to remove the recipes from future reprints of the book to “prevent further aggravation.”

Can you copyright a recipe?

While intellectual property law—which covers patents, trademarks, copyright and trade secrets—can be used to protect unique names of creations such as the Cronut or trade secrets like the formula for Coca-Cola, it’s much trickier with recipes.

Copyright law in Australia, where Bellamy and Maehashi are based, follows the same broad architecture as in the United States and Britain, where simple lists of ingredients or recipe steps can’t be protected because they are regarded as an idea.

It is only when there is a highly original expression of instructions or a collection of recipes, such as in a book, that there may be a basis for a claim.

Legal experts say the proliferation of content in the online world has amplified opportunities for creators to share their content, but also makes distinguishing its origins difficult.

“Recipes are mostly derivative of each other, and I think that’s OK,” said Jenné Claiborne, the creator of recipe website Sweet Potato Soul. “The problem comes when you clearly copy someone’s unique spin or original never-before-seen recipe without credit.”

In 2021, the publisher of London-based chef Elizabeth Haigh’s highly anticipated cookbook, “Makan: Recipes from the Heart of Singapore,” withdrew the title from circulation “due to rights issues” after another author claimed that content in Haigh’s book, including recipes and other passages, had been copied from her own.

On the flip side, in 2010, Jessica Seinfeld won a copyright lawsuit filed against her after a New York judge ruled that her cookbook, “Deceptively Delicious,” did not plagiarize that of Missy Chase Lapine as the central idea behind both books—hiding vegetables in kids’ food—was not protectable by law.

In her Instagram statement, Bellamy described recipe development as being “enveloped in inspiration from other cooks, cookbook authors, food bloggers and content creators.” (Maehashi also said her baklava recipe was initially sourced and credited from another food website, Natasha’s Kitchen, before she rewrote it in her own words after testing it extensively.)

‘Court of public opinion’ may be quicker to judge

Daniela Simone, a senior lecturer in intellectual property law at Australia’s Macquarie University, said the scope of copyright law in Australia for recipes is “so thin, there would almost have to be exact copying” for a claim to succeed.

“They could have independently come up with the same way of expressing a particularly common method or set of ingredients,” Simone said.

“The key difference, for me at least, is between a moral wrong and a legal wrong. Plagiarism is a moral wrong—but legally it’s less likely to be successful,” she said in a phone interview.

William Miles, a partner at Briffa, a U.K.-based law firm specializing in intellectual property law, said the incident highlights the ethical issue of acknowledgment for inspiration, particularly in the online world where judgments from the public can be swift and brutal.

“To be honest, the damage could already be done by the court of public opinion,” he said. “And the judgment from the court of law, which might take a year or two years to produce, is often forgotten because … the bad media has already been generated.”