Margaret Fulton: Google animated Doodle celebrates Australian cook and cookbooks writer’s 97th birthday

Google animated Doodle celebrates the 97th birthday of Scottish-born Australian food and cooking writer, journalist, author and commentator Margaret Fulton, the first of this genre of writers in Australia, on October 6, 2021.

Who was Margaret Fulton?

Margaret Isobel Fulton OAM was born on 6 October 1924 in Nairn in the Scottish Highlands. Her parents emigrated to Australia, settling in Glen Innes, New South Wales when she was three years old. In 1970s Australian kitchens, no other cookbooks were more common than those wrote by beloved Scottish-born Australian food writer and journalist Margaret Fulton.

As a child, Margaret Fulton was a Girl Guide and head of the Magpie Patrol in Glen Innes. In her time as a Guide she learned how to cook over a campfire. At 18, Fulton moved to Sydney in the expectation of becoming a dress designer, yet subsequent to hearing a prediction that the food industry would blast in post-war Australia, she rather sought after a career in cookery.

Margaret Fulton started as a cooking teacher at the Overseas Corporation in 1947 and was subsequently elevated to team lead. She was to some degree liable for the acquaintance of the pressure cooker with Australia.

In 1954, Margaret Fulton, then, at that point, a home economist for a leading firm of cereal manufacturers, gave a discussion on “cooking with ready-to-eat cereals”. In 1956, more than four days, Fulton gave French cooking presentations.

Fulton started to show up in ads in the late 1950s. She promoted Johnson’s Glo-coat floor polish and Johnson’s Pride surface polish from her well appointed Sydney kitchen in March 1957.

In 1968, The Margaret Fulton Cookbook was published by Paul Hamlyn and was a moment achievement. By 1978 it had sold more than 66% of a million copies.

Margaret Fulton came back to the Italian theme with the publication of her Italian Cookbook in 1973. In October 1973, Fulton was selected to the federal government’s Interim Commission on Consumer Standards.

Following on from the fame of late 1970s BBC TV drama series The Duchess of Duke Street, set in London somewhere in the range of 1900 and 1925, Margaret Fulton had a primetime TV cooking show of 5-minute episodes dependent on recipes from the era.

In 1979, Margaret Fulton’s interest in Chinese cooking prompted her leading an organized 23-day gourmet food tour, which would incorporate the best restaurants of Canton, Shanghai, Tsinan, Tsingtao, Kunming and Peking.

Margaret Fulton was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 1983 Queen’s Birthday Honors “In recognition of service to the media as a journalist and writer in the field of cookery”.

Fulton was one of the writers who started presenting Chinese recipes to Menzies’ Australia (recalling the period of Robert Menzies as prime minister from 1949 to 1966).

In 1998, Margaret Fulton was added to the list of 100 Australian Living Treasures by the National Trust of Australia. That same year, a packaged meals business project ‘Margaret Fulton’s kitchen’ failed. Fulton had been associated with it with ‘Sydney food luminary’ Anders Ousback’.

In 2006, The Bulletin named Margaret Fulton in their list of “The 100 most influential Australians”.

In 2014, Fulton showed up on an Australian postage stamp as part of the ‘Australia Post Legends Awards’.

Margaret Fulton died on 24 July 2019 at 94 years old at Southern Highlands in New South Wales, Australia.

With a career spreading over 50 years, Margaret Fulton is Australia’s most popular and most beloved cookery writer. Her interest in food has taken her to numerous countries, and she is credited as being one of the first persons to bring international cooking to the Australian table.

Margaret Fulton’s early recipes urged Australians to adjust their traditional staple of meat and three vegetables and to be innovative with food. She supported international cooking from places like Spain, Italy, India and China. As the cookery editor of the Woman’s Day magazine, she brought these into Australian homes through her articles.

Margaret Fulton had authored more than 25 cookbooks, which have exceptionally impacted Australia’s culinary landscape. Margaret’s pre-eminence in the food world was authoritatively proclaimed when she was honoured with the O.A.M. (Medal of the Order of Australia), and was perceived as one of the National Trust’s 100 Living Australian National Treasures.

In spite of the fact that, she accomplished some TV work, Fulton predominantly focused on writing, since she felt it was her higher ability.

Google Doodle on Margaret Fulton’s 97th Birthday

On October 6, 2021, Google featured an animated Doodle on its homepage for celebrating Margaret Fulton’s 97th Birthday and her legacy of spicing up the Australian palate with international cuisine or cooking.

Albeit international fare was at that point the norm in countless kitchens around the mainland, the majority of the Anglo-Australian people had held a moderately basic culinary tradition for decades.

Thanks to innovators, for example, Margaret Fulton who were propelled by these cooking customs, numerous Australian families broke convention to accept better approaches to take care of their families—an amazing cultural phenomenon that added to the country’s modern status as a culinary melting pot.