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Nagi Maehashi has reacted to Erin Patterson’s guilty verdict in the murder trial that captivated the world.
RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi has revealed how upset she was to discover her beef Wellington recipe was used to murder three people in the Victorian country town of Leongatha.
The self-taught cook and best-selling author took to social media on Tuesday to plead for privacy in the wake of the Erin Patterson murder trial.
“It is of course upsetting to learn that one of my recipes – possibly the one I’ve spent more hours perfecting than any other – [and] something I created to bring joy and happiness, is entangled in a tragic situation,” Maehashi wrote to her 1.6 million Instagram followers.
“Other than that, I have nothing to say and I won’t be talking to anyone.”
On Monday, after nine weeks of hearing evidence and another six days of deliberations, a jury found Patterson, 50, guilty of murdering three relatives and attempting to kill a fourth during lunch at her home in the Victorian country town of Leongatha in 2023.
The prosecution argued Patterson knowingly served individual beef Wellingtons containing poisonous death cap mushrooms to her parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, Gail’s sister Heather Pattinson, and Heather’s husband, Ian Pattinson who fell into a coma but survived the ordeal.
Patterson told the court she sourced the recipe from RecipeTin Eats cookbook, Dinner. Maehashi’s beef Wellington recipe was originally published on the RecipeTin Eats website in 2022, and stood as a testament to Maehashi’s meticulous dedication to recipe development.
“I’m proud to say I’ve finally cracked one of the trickiest of haute cuisine classics, the grand beef Wellington,” Maehashi wrote.
“The end result is incredibly juicy, edge-to-edge rose pink beef encased in pastry boasting a flawlessly crispy base.”
The recipe proved too difficult and too bland for Patterson, she told the court in June. Patterson claimed she made six individual beef Wellingtons, rather than one large Wellington as the recipe called for, because she “couldn’t find, you know, the big log that the recipe called for.” Instead, she purchased five twin packs of eye-fillet steaks.
The mother-of-two initally said she added “dried mushrooms … bought from the grocer” to the recipe, because it “seemed a little bland”. Maehashi’s recipe called for 700 grams of portobello mushrooms for the duxelles, but Patterson used button mushrooms in addition to dried death cap mushrooms – apparently in all but her own portion, which was served on a different coloured plate from the rest.
