'For more than forty years Margaret Fulton has been writing about food and cookery. Generations of Woman, Woman's Day, and New Idea readers have used her recipes and benefited from her advice on cooking and entertaining. Her cookbooks have sold millions of copies. Now, in I Sang for My Supper, the doyenne of Australian food writers tells the story of her life.
The youngest of six children of Scottish migrants, Margaret Fulton was three years old when her family arrived in Australia in 1927. She grew up in Glen Innes, New South Wales, and came to Sydney during World War II to seek a career as a fashion designer. Wartime restrictions, however, led her to a job at Australian Gas Light Company giving cookery classes and demonstrations. And so her career in food began, a career that has made her name a household word and resulted in her being awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia and declared an Australian National Living Treasure.
'But life for Margaret Fulton has not always been plain sailing. A failed first marriage left her as a young single mother with no money. Her experience as part owner of Berida Manor, a health resort that played host to the Commonwealth Heads of Government immediately after the Hilton bombing in 1978, prompted a journalist to dub her 'the hostess with the mostest - the most prime ministers and the most problems'. And for ten of her later years she lived under the threat of financial ruin and the loss of her beloved home in Balmain.
The heartaches and the highlights make engrossing reading.
'Part memoir, part social history, part food commentary, I Sang for My Supper not only tells the personal story of an influential Australian woman but presents a picture of the changing social and cultural scene in Australia from the 1920s to the present and illustrates how Australia's cuisine has changed in those years.
Photographs from family albums, press clippings and illustrations, as well as many of Margaret Fulton's favourite recipes from each period of her life, add a nostalgic flavour to a book that conveys all the warmth, humour and drama of a remarkable life.' (Publication summary)
'Margaret Fulton is more than just our national cooking matriarch, she is a living legend. Her life story is full of the ingredients needed to make a musical. Doug MacLeod (head writer and producer of The Comedy Company and Fast Forward) and Yuri Worontschak (composer of everything from Fast Forward to Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell) collaborate with the Present Tense ensemble (Chants Des Catacombes) to bring her unique and surprising story to the stage, in this culinary musical experience.'
Source: Theatre Works website, www.theatreworks.org.au (sighted 05/11/2012)
'Stories are very important in order to understand who we are and where we have come from … Many stories can make us nostalgic for the food of our childhood or for some other happy time. (Alexander 1988, vii)
‘Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake’ is a distinctively Australian story that fits into a subgenre of food memoir. The food memoir is an established and important subgenre of the memoir, with American writer M.F.K Fisher described as its mother (Waxman 2008, 364). Food memoir is traditionally seen as ‘modest and incomplete in comparison to the monumental, self promoting autobiography’ (Pettinger 2008, 135). Reflections on childhood are frequent in memoirs – childhood occupies a central position in the emerging notion of ‘self’ (Protschky 2009, 373) – and in food memoir, the story frequently traces the author's passage from child to adult and their discovery of a passion for food (Fulton 1999; Alexander 2012; Wood 2012).' (Author's introduction)
'Stories are very important in order to understand who we are and where we have come from … Many stories can make us nostalgic for the food of our childhood or for some other happy time. (Alexander 1988, vii)
‘Lovelight Chocolate Chiffon Cake’ is a distinctively Australian story that fits into a subgenre of food memoir. The food memoir is an established and important subgenre of the memoir, with American writer M.F.K Fisher described as its mother (Waxman 2008, 364). Food memoir is traditionally seen as ‘modest and incomplete in comparison to the monumental, self promoting autobiography’ (Pettinger 2008, 135). Reflections on childhood are frequent in memoirs – childhood occupies a central position in the emerging notion of ‘self’ (Protschky 2009, 373) – and in food memoir, the story frequently traces the author's passage from child to adult and their discovery of a passion for food (Fulton 1999; Alexander 2012; Wood 2012).' (Author's introduction)
