Margaret Isobel Fulton, who died on Wednesday aged 94, was born in Nairn in the Scottish Highlands on October 10, 1924. She was the youngest of six children. The family moved to Australia when she was three, settling in Glen Innes. The story below was first published in the Glen Innes Examiner on February 23, 2010
If cookbook author Margaret Fulton had a recipe for success, it would surely include fresh ideas, a glass half-full of optimism, zest for life, a dash of cheek, and perfect timing.
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For that is what the 'queen of the kitchen' served to the people of Glen Innes, where she returned to her home town appear at last weekend's annual show.
She may be small in stature (she's barely five foot) and somewhat frail, but her quick wit and feisty views on vegetable and meat production left no doubt that the passion for food that was ignited in her childhood home in Glen Innes, has not diminished.
Indeed, food was at the heart of a special welcome for her family in the Presbyterian (now Uniting) Church hall when with her parents and five siblings, she arrived in the district from Scotland, in 1927 when aged three.
"My brothers had never seen so much food in their lives, and one of my brothers started crying. Someone said, 'What's the matter John', and he said, 'Alex's eating more cake than I am', and someone said, 'well you can have some more,' and he said, 'but I can't fit it in'."
Alongside her mother, she learnt that cooking was as much about the love and care that went into it, as the ingredients themselves.
"In the kitchen was where we all came together as a family. It wasn't just a time for us to nurture our bodies, but it was a time to nurture our souls and our hearts and our minds," she said.
Despite the hardship of the Depression and war years, the business of her father, a master tailor, meant there was plenty to go around.
"A lot of the farmers didn't have any money to pay Dad for their nice dungarees and things like that, so they used to bring in a whole sheep, and a whole churn of butter, and every Christmas we had turkeys looking over the fence waiting for mother to chop their head off, and we were always being given food because people couldn't pay their bills," she told the Examiner in front of an audience of more than 120 on show Friday afternoon.
Her mother may have been the influence in the kitchen, but her father never seemed far from her either, as she recollected her childhood.
She told how touched she was, when speaking in Grafton, that a man gave her a present - her father's tailoring shears, which have since been donated to the Australian Archives in Canberra and will feature in a book Fulton is to launch later this month.
"When I was a wee school girl I used to go in after school to the tailoring shop, and Dad would send across opposite where there was a pastry cook and he would buy a snail bun. Then he'd cut the snail bun in four, and he'd give me the bits of snail bun. It was our secret - Mum would have been furious with him, cutting a snail bun with his scissors, but it's the sort of secrets fathers and little girls just love to have."
In a quiet moment the next day, when Deepwater grazier David Robertson-Cuninghame gave her a beautifully kept tail coat made by her father, the exquisite quilted satin lining brought a tear to the eye.
She happily signed dozens of copies of her old cookbooks, and caught up with former classmates from Glen Innes High School, where she won prizes for music, physiology, and not surprising, home economics, even if the teacher wasn't up to her mother's standard.
"I was very good at cooking bread and then we could use it as a doorstop. No, school cooking wasn't exactly the tops," she said.
The need for wartime labour meant on leaving school she did not take up a teaching scholarship, ending up in a munitions factory in Sydney.
"Aeroplanes were falling down from the sky and we were losing our lovely boys, and they decided it was the nuts and bolts in the aeroplanes. Because I had done science up to a stage, I got pushed into a laboratory for x-raying nuts and bolts and other things, some of the secret war weapons I was also doing, but I didn't like it and I got out."
She moved to the Australian Gas Light Company where amongst other things, she taught blind people to cook.
And with gas emerging as a source of energy in the kitchen, she was perfectly placed to be amongst the first to be 'cooking with gas'. Erudite and driven, it was also just one example of her being in the right place at the right time.
For a period while managing the home economics department at David Jones, she lived with her sister and brother-in law, who introduced her to the Mediteranean vegetables they had grown when they lived in France and Italy.
Headhunted by Woman's Day, she was among the first females to be given her own byline; the magazine's co-owner Rupert Murdoch asked her to help develop menus for Ansett, the airline he at one time coowned. With all of this came power.
But it was the sharing of ideas around the kitchen table at home, and being both the youngest and short in stature, that helped her have confidence to stand up for what she believed in - including, now, her opposition to genetically modified food and beef cattle feedlots.
"The first time I spoke for Greenpeace there was a very tall fellow who was speaking ahead of me, and he walked off the stage and the microphone was up here, and I was down here, and I said, 'come back, think about the small people'. He came back and he fixed the microphone and I said to them, 'there's an old African saying - if you think you are too small to make a difference, just spent a night in a dark room with a mosquito'.
"It's true. It doesn't matter how small you are, you can make a difference, and I think if there's something you feel that is very wrong, that you speak up about it."
