Margaret began teaching Australians to cook more than 50 years ago, and she is still highly respected by cooking professionals and readers of her magazine features and books (is there an Australian household that does not own a Margaret Fulton cookbook?)

Far from being the “old school”, fashionable cooks are just catching up with quince paste, which she was making 35 years ago, and she made her own goat cheese when the rest of the world thought a prawn cocktail was the height of sophistication. A good recipe never goes out of fashion, Margaret says. She still makes Indian Ghee Rice, learned in India and included in her first book The Margaret Fulton Cookbook, published in 1968.

Margaret was the first inductee to the Australian World Food Media Hall of Fame in 1997, and now is as busy as ever, as an honorary governor of the Human Nutrition Unit at Sydney University, making television appearances, serving as an Australia Day ambassador, packing halls for talks against genetically engineered food and coming to Hobart to teach and talk for our Table Club.

Her first cooking job was in Sydney demonstrating how to use gas cookers, and she says in her autobiography, I Sang for My Supper, that she became very good at making scones, pastry and sponge cakes when doing them four times a day four days a week. We thought, therefore, that a morning tea would be a fitting event to introduce Margaret to Hobart.

At the same school she taught a class of blind people to cook, which honed her teaching abilities. “We made scones,” she said. “When they took them out of the oven, I said I knew they were ready because they were risen and golden. They said they had a certain smell. I gave them a tap, and they said they would remember that sound. It made me realise that you have to explain everything and give clear instructions.”

Margaret prides herself not on creating original recipes, but on adapting the proven ones for home cooks and modern equipment. For instance, she was taught to make Quiche Lorraine by a French housewife, but adapted it to have far less pastry and to suit modern tinware instead of being made in a Pyrex dish.

But some recipes should be left alone. And in that number she puts the “much-abused” Caesar Salad, for which there are just as many mangled stories of its derivation as there are versions of it. She learned how to make the real thing from its creator Alexander Cardini, who she met in Mexico City in 1967. He had created the salad in the 1920s, and named it for his brother Caesar, who was also a chef and is often wrongly credited with creating the salad. The real salad, which does not contain bacon, and certainly not chicken, is one of the recipes Margaret will demonstrate at her Table Club cooking class on March 13.

“When you have tasted something that has really been perfected, it’s such a delight,” she said. “It’s a lovely, elegant, thought-out thing as it was created.”

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