Margaret Fulton OAM

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

Margaret Fulton changed what Australia ate and how we cooked it. She was born in Nairn, Scotland, in 1924, the youngest of six children.

Her family emigrated to Australia when she was three years old and settled in the NSW town of Glen Innes. Her mother had ambitions for her to become a great pianist, but thanks to a hockey mistress who ‘pulverised’ her thumb for mistakes, ‘the world lost a second- rate pianist, and got a good cook’.

As a child, Fulton observed that many women excelled at baking, but not at cooking, like her mother. At school she ‘learnt to cook so badly’ but she rectified this poor education in a series of jobs after school where she taught cooking classes and began to break the bland ‘meat and three veg’ monotony that was Australian cuisine in the 1940s and early 50s. Fulton embraced the joy of cooking (French-style at first) and sharing a family meal, and championed the use of fresh, quality ingredients.

Her first job as a magazine cookery editor came about not because of her writing skills but because she baked good bread rolls for the company’s board of directors, something they liked at their monthly lunch. So began a long history of Fulton’s communication with Australians about cooking and entertaining. She undertook some formal training at East Sydney Technical College and then became food editor of Woman’s Day magazine where she had ‘this wonderful job of telling [women] how to enrich and enliven and have fun and enjoy cooking’. She embraced many culinary traditions from around the world, especially those from Asia.

When her first book, The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, was published in 1968, it became an instant hit. Fulton has continued to publish cookbooks and moved into the digital age. She has never stopped learning and disseminating information to others, and her daughter and two granddaughters have followed in her footsteps.