Elaine Reeves: Farewell to Margaret Fulton, Queen of the Dessert

Margaret Fulton was a hardworking, well-travelled, and very well-respected cook whose recipes have stood the test of time, writes Elaine Reeves.

LAST Wednesday when I heard on the 2pm news that Margaret Fulton had died, my first instinct was to talk to someone about it.

I phoned Judith Sweet, knowing she would want to talk about this cook whom she knew and greatly respected.

Judith first met Margaret Fulton at Franklin Manor in Strahan where Margaret was to do cooking demonstrations.

On the morning before the first one she confided to Judith she was nervous.

Margaret Fulton, left, in discussion with Judith Sweet at Salamanca during a visit to Hobart. Picture: TONY PALMER

Judith was at first amazed, and then reassured “because it showed me she really cared about what she was doing and presenting. She wasn’t in the least blase”.

When Judith accepted an invitation to visit Margaret at her home in Balmain in Sydney “she made a mushroom risotto, and we had it with a glass of wine at the dining table right in the middle of the window looking down the harbour to the bridge,” she said.

In 2003, Hill Street Grocer brought Margaret to Tasmania for some cooking demonstrations, for which Judith was her right-hand woman.

The banter between them showed another side of Margaret. “She was such fun,” said Judith.

Margaret was not one of those cookbook authors who tells readers to use her recipes as a jumping off point and to tweak away.

Talk show host Andrew Denton once said to her that he’d heard that “you should play around a little bit” with a recipe.

“Well, I don’t say ‘play around a bit. I say follow the recipe’,” Margaret firmly told him.

Her recipes were arrived at through thorough practice, painstaking testing and/or handed on by their creators.

Her first cooking job in her early 20s was demonstrating the wonders of cooking with gas in Sydney.

She said in her 1999 autobiography I Sang For My Supper that she made scones, little patty cakes, pastry and sponge cakes “four times a day, every day of the week”.

“You never lose the touch. It has stood me in good stead as I baked my way through life,” she wrote.

For her first Margaret Fulton Cookbook in 1968, she tested each of the 600 or so recipes three times and then “lay flat out on that sofa for a month”, her granddaughter Kate Gibbs, to whom she had gifted the sofa, relates in Margaret and Me.

In 1954 she began writing for newspapers and magazines. Nobody put “celebrity” in front of “chef” in those days, but enviable travel budgets for women’s magazines saw Margaret travelling the world.

In China she watched chefs “doing the most exquisite things” but they wanted her to teach them to make sandwiches (which they ate with chopsticks).

In Mexico she met the creator of the Caesar Salad, Alexander Cardini, who named it for his brother Caesar.

She demonstrated the salad in Hobart and railed against abominations containing bacon, mayo and chicken.

Judith, who has many Swedish connections, often cooks Margaret’s recipes for Swedish meatballs.

“Always the comments are along the lines of these are amazing, these are authentic.”

Margaret Fulton Cookbook includes an international section of recipes from Spain, China and India, all of which she collected from chefs and home cooks at the source — and took great pride in passing on faithfully.

In 2004, Margaret’s daughter Suzanne Gibbs and her friend Jannie Brown decided to update and republish the book. Amazingly, 80 per cent of the recipes in the new edition were in the original.

There had been some changes — flour as a thickener was gone, stock cubes were no longer mentioned and nor was turtle soup. Cream puffs were renamed profiteroles, and items that had not been available in 1968, such as fresh tuna and salmon, shiitake mushrooms and coriander were introduced.

The consistency was there because the fundamentals still apply, Margaret said when I interviewed her about the new book.

“Chicken is still roasted in the same way, eggs are still boiled the same way and vegetables are very much cooked the same way, because I was saying how to cook vegetables properly in 1968.”

Margaret Fulton is survived by her daughter Suzanne Gibbs and her granddaughters Kate Gibbs and Louise Fulton Keats.

I think a memorial batch of scones made with buttermilk is called for — with no improvisations.

Vale Margaret Fulton
October 6, 1924 — July 24, 2019.