Margaret Fulton
Nairn native who emigrated to Australia and widened a nation’s culinary horizons
Margaret Fulton, cookery writer. Born: October 10 1924 in Nairn. Died: 24 July 2019 in the Southern Highlands, New South Wales, aged 94.
Margaret Fulton emigrated from Scotland as an infant in the 1920s, settled in Australia and introduced millions there to Asian, French and Italian food – such unfamiliar and challenging dishes as spaghetti, with an easy step-by-step guide not just on how to cook it but how to eat it as well.
The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was first published in 1968, at a time when the staple was still “meat and three veg”. It included instructions on how to boil rice and sold about 1.5 million copies, a phenomenal figure in a comparatively small country.
“By the end of the century, few Australian households were without at least one Fulton title,” said The Australian newspaper.
A single mother, with little money, living in a small settlement on the Hawkesbury River, Fulton grew her own vegetables, caught fish, kept ducks and goats and then began her career as a cookery writer with Woman magazine in the mid1950s, eventually earning herself the unofficial title of “The Woman Who Taught Australia to Cook”.
Not only did she widen a nation’s culinary horizons, she is also credited with widening the cultural horizons of a very white, conservative and inward-looking society.
“In the 50s people from other countries started coming to Australia – there was a certain level of resistance to them and to their food,” said food writer Barbara Santich. “With Margaret introducing it and integrating it with what they did know, it contributed to integrating those other cultures into Australia.”
The youngest of six children, Margaret Isobel Fulton was born in Nairn in 1924. Her father was a tailor who seems to have had a reasonably successful business in Glasgow, though the family also spent time in the north of Scotland, where he supplied the hunting and fishing fraternity.
However, with a spirit of adventure, he decided to pursue a new life with his family in Australia when Fulton was only a few years old. The country town of Glen Innes in New
South Wales was quite a culture shock for an urbane family who enjoyed music, reading and the arts.
“Mum and Dad were used to going to theatre and balls and here we got to this tiny-weeny town,” Fulton recalled in one interview.
Recalling her first sight of her new home, she said: “We walked in and there was this little sitting room… There was an old fuel stove, no sink, an old tin bath and a chip heater; the laundry was a copper in the backyard.” At school she was nicknamed “Scotch”.
She learned how to cook from her mother and got a job demonstrating cooking and baking for customers at the Australian Gas Light Company. Never slow to share her views, she described her work colleagues at the utility company as “the smallest minds in the world”.
She married and had daughter, but the union lasted only two years. Small, but feisty, Fulton moved out. She and her daughter moved in with her sister and her husband, attempting to be as self-sufficient as possible in what sounds a little like a real-life Australian version of The Good Life.
In 1954 she got a job as cookery writer with Woman magazine, writing under the name Ann Maxwell. Subsequently she joined an advertising company whose clients included Kellogg’s and Kraft. She arranged French cookery demonstrations with French hostesses resident in Sydney and started appearing in adverts herself, promoting the use of Sellotape for everything from sticking recipes in books to binding pot handles.
She had already established a considerable reputation and following when in 1960 she became food editor of Woman’s Day magazine, a job that provided her with the opportunity to travel, research the cuisines of Europe and Asia and then introduce them to her readers back home. She remained with Woman’s Day for almost 20 years.
The Margaret Fulton Cookbook included both traditional and exotic recipes, with simple instructions “that even men could follow”. It became the default cookbook for several generations of Australians, it went through numerous reprints and revisions over the years and was followed by a string of other books.
“I was doing what I loved,” she said in a television interview in 1997. “I was hot. People were wanting me to do things. People were wanting me to visit their countries. People were wanting to show me what lovely things they were making and doing.
“Basically I was like a sponge, I was soaking it all in. And then I was able to do what people dream about, and that is tell other people… It was like having a hobby – that you were actually paid to do your hobby and that was lovely.”
She was described as a “culinary icon” by The Australian and “Australia’s first domestic goddess, albeit a pocket-sized version” by the Sydney Morning Herald.
In 1983 she appeared in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia, and in 2012 she was the subject of a musical that toured Australia, entitled Margaret Fulton: Queen of the Dessert.
Although she made a fortune from her books, a disastrous business venutre forced her to keep working. It kept her profile high, although she was warned by her doctor to slow down. She continued to insist on cooking with butter and had a quadruple heart bypass in 2005. She appeared as a guest judge on the first Australian series of Masterchef in 2009.
Fulton was married three times. Two marriages ended in divorce. Her third husband predeceased her. She is survived by a daughter and two granddaughters.