From the Australian. This is the weekend edition of The Front. I'm Claire Harvey, Albow versus Dutton, Pope Leo versus the other Cardinals?
Who cares?
The real contest energizing Australians this month is Nagi versus Brookie, a debate so divisive it cut through the political chatter like a hot knife through butter.
You know the old recipe tins that you file recipes in.
Recipe tin Eats is a online version of.
My old Famed author cook and owner of recipe Tin Eats, Nagi Mahashi took to Instagram accusing Penguin Books of publishing a cookbook with plagiarized recipes.
Everyone has been asking me for my cookie recipes since my bakery went viral.
Bake with Brookie is officially in stores October twenty nine.
Might seem trivial at first, but the stakes change pretty quickly when the book in question, Bake with Brookie by Brooke Bellamy, is reported to have generated over four million dollars in revenue since publication six months ago. Bellamy has denied copying anyone's recipes. The stakes changed again when it was revealed the recipes in question were for two of the most sacred baked goods, Buckliver and Australia's own caramel slice.
Consider me rattled when I saw this.
When news of the alleged plagiarism hit, everyone had an opinion from the self assured.
Some people say it's just a recipe, but I think that's missing the point. The idea of plagiarizing a particular recipe just seems a bit ludicrous to me.
To people whose feelings were more dubious.
Look, I'm not really Anthony Bourdain, but I feel like it could easily be a coincidence.
Some people felt inspired.
So there's been a lot of drama over this caramel slice, so let's make it.
Others dismayed.
I saw the rooms this morning and I was like, damn, Now my cookies have controversy.
In the newsrooms of The Australian. It's been literated at Caroline Overington, Hello and feature writer Fiona Harari Hi leading the debate. Now, Fiona, you said the other day, in high excitement in the middle of the office.
The bucklover is this smoking.
Gun, which I thought was a phrase that I just had to get onto the front. Tell me why is the Bucklover the smoking gun, and what are we talking about?
The bucklover is a smoking gun. Look. I did a bit of a search for Bucklob I recipes.
That have a lot of hits, and oh, the variations were quite extraordinary. There are so many variations in a the ingredients, be the quantities, and see the instructions for Bucklob recipes that when you're getting down to things like one hundred and seventy five meals of this and one hundred and eighty five grams of that, and you know the number of sheets of felow that you need and the number of strips.
That you need to cut it into.
That did make me wonder how you could end up with two recipes that were really much more similar than any other bu clever recipes I was able to find.
In The Australian's newsroom, we spend quite a bit of time talking about quite serious things. I often see you, Fiona, having very deep conversations about injustice or major health problems that.
People are going through.
I don't think I've ever seen you as excited about a story as you were about this.
I mean, it's got everything, but it's also quite unlike most stories we're used to seeing.
You know, no one's started in the process.
There's no really politics involved, there's no crime. The fact that a recipe, you know, which is something so intrinsically based in our homes, could become the subject of such you know, fascination and discussion and so many questions did she do it?
Did she not do it? Is fantastic for those of us watching on It's a food fight.
Did online fes are just fantastics?
Are I was very proud of myself.
I suggested a headline to the editor and he used it in print, which was Rumble In the Crumble, I'd have with myself for that.
One of the.
Debates that's arisen out of the Rumble is whether or not it's possible to own a recipe, or whether recipes are part of our collective cultural knowledge. Personally, I think it is absolutely possible, and I think the fact that that is even questioned suggests that we don't really value women's work or women's intellectual property. This is considered a feminine domain, baking, and there seems to be a slightly snobbish assumption that was all the same and it all must be easy.
What did you think about that well.
I think that's incredibly astute because this is big business. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars generated by two female entrepreneurs. And it also peeled back some layers, if you will, on the book industry, because cookbook books are far and away the most successful books in Australia. Like without the cookbook industry, many publishers quite simply would collapse. Now in terms of whether or not you can copyright a recipe, plagiarism is not in itself a crime. You
can't be sued for plagiarism. It's not a criminal offense. Traditionally in journalism it's been a moral thing. But it's interesting to me that that creative work, as you say, because it's by women, perhaps attracts no protection in law.
That seems like a gap in the law to me, Fiona, what do you think?
Look for me, there's obviously a very important area of big business, but I think that there's a whole question of courtesy. That's what it comes down to for me, as someone who's cooked for a very long time and comes from a family of very keen bakers. In my very old and very worn recipe photo album at home, I have a recipe that is called simply Nancy's chocolate Cake.
I don't know who Nancy is.
I think she was a friend of my auntie's, and I think I got this recipe thirty years ago, but it will always been Nancy's chocolate cake. And people make recipes that I've given them, and I may have got it from a cookbook years ago, but it's known as Fiona's brownie is because I gave it to them. Now, I've never professed to have come up with that recipe, but I think that over a very long time, there's been a tradition where you acknowledge who you have received
a particular recipe from. And this is not to say what has or has not gone on this case. I think that as a basic courtesy, people have always generally acknowledged, I think when they've received a recipe from someone else. So as a very first instance, I think you should do that. Can you own a recipe, Well, you can't own a buckle of a recipe, but you can presumably have your version credited to yourself, is the way I would put it.
What's interesting to me is I think people would accept that if you have a very special recipe, you own it. The one example that has been given to me since this story broke was the snow egg. Now everybody knows that the snow egg is owned by Peter Gilmore because he invented it, he presented it on Master Chef. If you saw that meringue on the little bowl of Grenda anywhere else, you would know exactly where they got it from.
What the problem is here is that the two recipes that Nagi says have appeared in Brookie's book, rightly or wrongly, are for a caramel slice and baklava.
Now baklover is.
At least three thousand years old and probably longer. It's certainly been made by people in the Middle East for at least that long. And the caramel slice a recipe for that has been on the side of the nest lay tin for at least fifty years. So it wasn't unique enough. It's not a snow egg.
When you talked about the smoking gun, about the buckle of Afiona, I think one of the things you might have been referring to is the formatting of these recipes. So it's not just that the ingredients are identical down to the gram, but that the paragraphs are formatted in the same way, so there's three sentences in the paragraph, there's a break and there's not a threat.
And the order in.
Which the instructions are given as well, like take your forty sheets of Philo pastry, cut them in four slices on the diagonal. I mean, they're very specific instructions. And again, on my quick perusal of different buckclover recipes before, there were huge variations. There's lebonones, bucklova, there's Greek bucklov there's different types of nuts. Some of them seem to have orange blossom water in there. There are a lot of variations.
I know.
Yeah, caramel slice maybe because there are fewer ingredients.
Yes, but there's also the point that you can't make a caramel slice without including those ingredients. And that's what Brookie said. She's like, at the end of the day, cooking is not just not just a matter of throwing things together. It's a science. Things react to each other. That's why the recipes work. So it's not like you can say, oh, okay, dump in three cups of flour and make it.
It has to be one cup.
I hadn't been aware that in the recipe t and eats version. So she actually says, I've taken this recipe from someone else.
Yeah, And she does that with actually quite a few recipes, because we agree that everybody has their recipe and then they put like little bit of ginger in it. That's your little twist.
I think if you've cooked for long enough and there are recipe that you follow, I know, in my case, there are things that I've had a recipe for originally, and I've made it so many times over so many years that I you know, you lose the recipe, you remember it and you add your own additions to it, and that's how it becomes your version of a bucklovar, or of a spaghetti bolonnaise, or whatever else it might be.
But then other people come along. So let's say, for example, the first person to stick a lemon up the chickens bump, like that's now done by I did make a hand gesture like that's now done by everyone. The first person to put their hand under the skin, you know, and rub the garlic around, but that's now done by everyone. So who is to say who owns that particular little twist? Well of the lemon?
But then what are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to do? If you see a version of a work that you believe you have produced and you see pretty much the same ingredients, instructions steps, what are you supposed to do?
Is it out there?
Have you given it out there to everyone? Or do you have some sort of say over how it's.
How it's presented? Now? Nagi said, I just would have liked some attribution because she's says the recipe was originally hers, and Brookie says, no, it wasn't.
So it wasn't originally hers. Wasn't it someone else's?
It's someone else? But she acknowledged that, right, But then.
Maybe the attribution needs to go to the original person. I don't know at what point do you? Where does the attribution begin and end?
Coming up? How the cookie has crumbled? Sorry?
The consequences of this cookbook controversy that Bellamy denies all accusations of plagiarism. She says she's been using the caramel slice recipe in question since twenty sixteen, four years before it was published by Nagi Mahashi in twenty twenty. Bellamy also offered to remove the recipe from future reprints of the book and express great respect for Nagi, but it seems the court of public opinion has sided with Nargu Mahashi, and naturally, people focused on the optics have followed suit.
The recipe plagiarism saga has escalated with Brook Bellamy in the owner of Baking Empire Brookie Bakehouse, dropped from a big ambassador role.
Bellamy was released from her role as ambassador at the Academy for Enterprising Girls, and when the two faced off at the Australian Book Industry Awards in Melbourne's CBD.
Nagi Mahashi, the founder of popular food blog recipe Team Eats, has bested fellow cookbook author Brook Bellamy in a major book prize.
But most predictably, it was the online pylon that was the most severe, leading to Nagi issuing a statement via her Instagram account.
Please stop the trolling. I know I've made serious allegations, but this does not justify the person at attacks that I've seen online against Brook Bellamy.
I was reading and Claire can attest to this. Probably way too many responses where this line of comments, and I don't know that much about either woman, but a lot of the people who were coming at quite ferociously in favor of Nagi, were saying because we love her, we love her, And I thought to myself, well, is that a reason to come out and to defend someone? To me, the argument should be not about if you
love someone or not. It's about if this has happened to someone's recipe, should that person be acknowledged or should they not be acknowledged. I mean, it's lovely that she's loved, but to me, that's not really what's the question, because there's there will be other cases where people.
Will allege their work has been used by others.
The reason people love Nagi is that she has done something different. She has brought something that Jamie Oliver, Nigella Laws and Bill Granger, you know, the guy with the chicken and a lemon.
It's another who owns the.
Beer can in a chicken. It's got to be. Yeah. What she brought to the table I think is her authenticity and that's another ingredient, as it were in this story. And she does it in such a superb way, whereas Brookie has always been a bit more about baking cookies from maybe a generation. Why audience not as broad.
See I don't think this is a question about personalities. I think they have nothing to do with it, and I know lots of people are getting it down to personalities. It's a wider question of who do you attribute, And I think in this case, in fact, maybe the original person needs to be attributed and she's been forgotten. You know, if Nagi has got the recipe from someone else and she has attributed to this person, maybe that's the person who needs the acknowledgment if her recipe has been taken.
Caroline Overington is The Australian's literary editor and Fiona Harari is a feature writer at The Australia. You can read their outstanding work anytime at the Australian dot com dot ay. This episode was hosted by me Claire Harvey and produced and edited by Jasper Leck, who also wrote our theme. Thanks for joining us on the front this week. Our team includes Kristin Amiot Leat Sammaglu, Tiffany Dimac, Josh Burton and Stephanie Combs.