KATE GIBBS is a Sydney-based food and travel writer whose work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Sydney Morning Herald, Australian Gourmet Traveller, delicious. magazine and many other publications. She writes a weekly food trends column in the Sunday Style magazine in The Sunday Telegraph, as well as a popular blog, kategibbs.com. Kate is the granddaughter of Australian food writer and National Living Treasure, Margaret Fulton. This is her third book.

FOREWORD

I’ve been interviewed by a lot of journalists. They want to know this and that about my life, what I eat, whether it’s a whole egg or an egg yolk in mayonnaise, or how to make the perfect sponge cake. As a writer myself, I always knew what they wanted, and could give them a pithy something. But these interviews with my granddaughter were different.

Writing a book in my family is always celebrated with a jolly cheer and perhaps a glass of champagne. This book was different.

‘It’s called Margaret and Me, Grandma,’ Kate told me when breaking the news that she would write a memoir with recipes.

‘Margaret who?’ I replied.

But Kate’s memoir – she calls it a foodoir, which makes me laugh – is my story, too. Her ongoing career and her passion for food are entwined in the tales of what I did, what I ate, and how I gave food and cooking my all. But Kate’s story is her own – different to mine yet as exciting. Woven within these pages are the adventures, fantastic fun and lives of two very strong, very independent women.

Our tales are different. Kate, so far, has not had to hitch a ride during a Great Depression. She has not won a job on the quality of her brown bread rolls. And I didn’t learn about the magic of a home-cooked meal while I was bedraggled and blistered in faraway China. I’ve spent the last thirty-odd years listening to Kate’s stories, hearing about her escapades, her ups and downs. And it’s so exciting to read them in book form.

I’ve had a marvellous time doing this food thing. I learned early on that breakfast can be a bit of a rush and lunch can pass by in a whirl. But all my life I have sat down with the family and friends I love for the evening meal, gathered to share not only the food but the day’s happenings. It’s the people that keep you going. As Kate and I sat down for yet another interview for this book, what joy it was sitting with her, reliving it all, and sharing it yet again with someone I love.

This is my legacy. I could not be more proud that my granddaughter Kate has embraced it with all the love, energy and sparkle that she uses, also, to take on the world.

Much love,

Margaret (Grandma)

December 2014

CONTENTS

Cover

Title

Foreword

Introduction

It starts with food

Break the mould

Almost perfect

Hard work

Love

Thanks

general index

recipe index

copyright

INTRODUCTION

Margaret Fulton looked up from her cup of tea and breakfast and met my eyes.

‘Is there salt in this, darling?’

I shook my head. I’d been watching her arteries.

‘Kate. There are three ingredients in porridge. Use all of them.’

I’ve been telling stories about my grandmother for a long time. When I was growing up, people asked what it was like to have the National Living Treasure, the indomitable Margaret, as a grandmother. They wanted detail. So I started telling stories. I told about the time she made my mother eat the maggots in the cooked cabbage, and when the butcher delivered a whole lamb to her house as payment for work, or how impressed she was when I returned from school camp one year and had finally figured out that it was polite to help clear the table (never mind that I stacked the plates at the table at first, it was a start).

As I grew older, gradually my grandmother slipped out of the tales of what-was-eaten, and I forged a career around writing stories for newspapers and magazines instead. As a journalist, my own experiences, the food and the remarkable chefs who cooked, the gastronomic world, became the fascinating centre of my epicurean scribblings.

But what Margaret ate, how she taught middle Australia how to cook, how she travelled and brought recipes for nasi goreng and rice pilaf back from overseas, and drew the majority of households away from a diet of boiled veg and chops and meals delivered with names so unromantically literal that they were hardly a cause of national pride, remains one of the most important stories of my life.

Food is important. My view on it echoes the 200-year-old words of the French lawyer and politician, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously wrote in The Physiology of Taste, ‘Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are’. Maybe if we could get a better grip on what we eat, where it comes from, and how we eat it, we could better understand ourselves.

Food can be the marker of our lives, too, a culinary pointer to what we did and how we did it, and who we did it with. These are the stories of all our lives, of holidays and the daily grind. For me, my father’s oyster fritters for breakfast on holidays a few hours north of Sydney, staying near the beach, remains one of my strongest memories. He’d wake us up by whistling Brahms, brewing pots of plunger coffee and tumbling these fried, crunchy morsels studded with whole oysters that tasted of the sea onto plates, lemon wedges for squeezing over. Then there were my mother’s hot Indian curries, mountains of pappadams and homemade chutneys, each of us serving and being served, talking over each other, spooning mango pickle from a jar, a sip of Dad’s beer. It helps me better understand myself, somehow.

Cooking for your people makes life better. Few of us like to cook for professional cooks and chefs for fear of being judged or, worse, berated. Better to bow to the experts and just bring dessert in a box. Usually, though, cooks are the most generous, gracious diners, who heap praise on those of us who bother to take to the saucepan or the whisk for them at all. Margaret is no exception. She once swore my Korean beef tacos were the best things she’s ever eaten. The saltless porridge though, not so much.

My grandmother talks about growing up at the table, singing for her supper. Everyone helped and pitched in, stirred the pots and set the table, cleared up. The kitchen was the centre of the house for her, as a child. And she made it so for us, too. I grew up the way many do, at the table, surrounded by family and friends. It’s the stories from these tables that I now share. This is my inheritance.

AN INTRODUCTION TO FOOD AND COOKERY

‘They taught us the daftest things,’ Grandma tells me. ‘Goodness only knows why I ever took up a career in food. I might have run away, gone into fashion or become a stage actor or a Bluebell girl, and never made a sponge cake at all.’

My grandmother, Margaret Fulton, was making her way through the Leaving Certificate exam of her final year domestic science class. The girls-only class incorporated a bit of cooking and sewing; it was about lining the fairer sex up to do the domestic arts that would be required of them later in life.

‘I learned how to make awful food, and to cook it badly.’

She knew it was bad. She’d tried the potted meat and sloppy stews, overhauled lumpy custard and cloying puddings.

She had taken one recipe on as a homework assignment in her mother’s kitchen. Margaret bought the ingredients herself on the way home from her local school in Glen Innes, in country New South Wales, pulled out her mother Isabella’s pots and pans, and set a single place at the kitchen table for the designated tester. Her father Alexander unfolded a napkin on his lap and prepared for the youngest of his six children’s foray into food.

‘Brains in white sauce, Father,’ she announced.

The brains were soft under the pressure of his knife, slightly grainy, the white sauce watery and a little lumpy: too much flour, not enough seasoning.

‘Father looked up at Mother and appealed with his eyes, as if to say “save me”,’ Margaret remembers. ‘Mother knew how to do brains in black butter sauce, a touch of vinegar for acidity – brains noisette.’

Isabella washed the plates and saucepans clean, then showed her how to make the dish properly: browning the butter for a nutty sauce, the brains just done.

Margaret entered the linoleum-clad classroom, her black hair in long plaits, pleated tunic with a fabric belt around her waist, white socks folded over twice, and prepared to cook more food badly, and be judged on it. But when she sat at her place in the classroom, she was presented with a twelve-foot damask tablecloth. Her task was to iron the fabric using a flat iron – the kind you need to heat over an actual fuel stove – even though electric irons were widely available then.

She says now: ‘Of course, to iron damask you need the fabric damp and the iron hot, so I did that. But what a ridiculous thing to test. I think they were just being cruel.’

Ironing damask, soggy brains and talentless teachers were not going to deter her from success, however. She had ambitions and nothing would stop her pursuing the career she really wanted: to be a leading Australian concert pianist. Or, failing that, a music teacher.

Andrew Denton, Australian interviewer and host of the long-running television show Enough Rope, asked Margaret in 2008 what she dreamed of doing when she was a child, knowing she never planned to be a cook.

‘When you decided to head into cooking as a career, you said that this wasn’t what nice young women did at that time,’ Denton pressed her in front of an audience.

‘No, I didn’t want to be a cook. I wanted to be a Bluebell Girl because...’

‘Which is?’

‘I had visions of me in Paris, you know, dancing across the stage, Andrew, and then I was going to marry a duke,’ Margaret said.

‘Mmm.’

My mother and I sat front row, hearing these aspirations for the first time. But we knew her, we knew she was going somewhere with this. The audience laughed.

Margaret continued: ‘And then he was going to run away with a younger girl and I was going to be left homeless.’

The audience laughed again, and Denton latched onto their thinking.

‘Not many people think through their fantasies to an unhappy ending, Margaret.’

‘Well, that’s why I didn’t do it.’

While the teenager was still working it all out, Margaret’s mother raised the subject of her daughter’s future career over dinner one night.

‘When Miss Scott gets married, Margaret will take over as the local piano teacher. I think it’s perfect,’ her mother announced, as if saying it made it so.

‘I loved piano and I knew everyone liked Miss Scott, so I thought I would be lucky to take her place,’ remembers Margaret.

Isabella would never push Margaret into something she didn’t want to do, but if Margaret wanted it, then she knew her girl well enough to know she could get it. She placed her napkin on the table and stood up to clear away the meal; the matter was sorted.

Margaret did want to be a pianist; her nimble fingers and joints from practising eight hours a day were proof. She had dreams of great concert halls and, perhaps one day, crossing paths with an orchestra in Sydney. Meanwhile her mother might have had her teaching school children until a wedding took her away from her career, just like it did Miss Scott. But they agreed on the piano at least.

‘Mother and Father had faith in me,’ she tells me now. ‘As a school student I wasn’t brilliant, but they kept me on, believing it was good for me. Like a lot of Scots, Mother used to say: “Margaret, you put it between here and here” – pointing between her temples – “and nobody can take that away from you. The Scots and the Jews know that.” ’

With a final exam at the Conservatorium of Music just days away, Margaret tied her hair in plaits and put on her sports tunic at school. She picked up her hockey stick and ran across the grass to compete with her classmates in a practice match to prepare for the finals. She’d just got going, barely warmed up, when she found the ball in her possession. She moved it across the field as fast as she could and had steadied herself to pass it to her teammate when she heard a cry from across the pitch.

‘Attack Margaret Fulton!’

In a bid to incite a bit of competition, the sports mistress had unwittingly unleashed the school bully onto Margaret.

‘I looked into her eyes and I could see what was coming next,’ she tells me. ‘“Whack” went the hockey stick on my unprotected thumb, and “whack” again. And bang went my brilliant career; my thumb was pulverised. That’s one way of looking at it, anyway. The world lost a second-rate pianist, a piano teacher at worst. I had to find something else I felt passionate about.’

THIRD-GENERATION FOODIE

The first thing I remember eating, ever, was a mussel. This was the first time I consciously put something in my mouth, chewed it, and actively swallowed it. Really ate it.

I was eight, just, by a matter of days. I’d persuaded my grandmother and her partner Michael that I could handle it. They argued with me for a bit, pointing to the cheese soufflé and the onion tarte tatin on the menu, but could see it was futile. We were on holidays in America, at this moment in Hawaii on the way to Los Angeles. I’d seen moules marinières listed on the fold-out pleather menu, with its slip-in paper rundown of the day’s specials, and there was no going back. My recent birthday and new age brought with them a sense of wanting to do something a bit daring. The next day for breakfast I could gorge myself on plate-sized waffles and whipped cream from a can at the hotel restaurant, but tonight – wearing my jumper with Donald Duck on the front and my crepe navy skirt, with clean hair and a bangle – tonight, I’d do something grown-up. Mussels seemed as grown-up as anything else.

Michael’s steak arrived, pommes frites on the side, and I envied his melting disc of butter with chopped chives. Grandma’s roast ‘baby chicken’ came as half a chicken. Mussels! I felt so clever ordering this smart dish, all black and shiny and adult-appropriate. But inside they were more quivery, pink, opening in distorted rippling mouths, than I remembered my parents making for themselves at home. I braved the first mussel but it wouldn’t go down. I chewed it a bit and tried again: no. I was embarrassed for myself. Grandma moved swiftly, shifting portions onto side plates, rearranging the table. My mussels became a shared plate between the adults. And I had a predictable quarter baby chicken.

You remember well the first time food transports you. You are a kid, you’ve been under the weather all week, and your mum brings a bowl of homemade chicken broth to the table. With every slurp from the hot spoon, you feel it rescuing you from the grey cloud of your head. Steam flushes over your cheeks and it lifts you.

Or maybe it’s the wedge of baklava, eaten in your bikini on the beach in Greece as a nineteen-year-old, your first boyfriend lying tanned beside you. You bite into the pastry, flaky, laden with pistachios and dripping with sweet aromatic golden honey.

Or, maybe, it’s the crackling shell of takeaway deep-fried chicken that you eat in your first dorm room, independent at last.

Food that you remember – food that stays with you all your life, no matter how rumpled the tablecloths or how convoluted the map to get there, no matter what it cost you (or someone else) – is the most powerful of all. These gastronomic markers of our lives take us back to places and moments, and allow us to recall our adventures, when everything else turns to dust.

Grandma’s New Year’s Eve parties: watching boats make their fairy-lit processions around the harbour, neighbours popping corks and lighting barbecues, cheering at ferries overloaded with people, rocking on the busy harbour as they progress under Sydney Harbour Bridge.

New Year’s Eve is like Christmas for us, a family gathering that encompasses as many friends as we’ve collected through the year, hope to reconnect with next year. It’s important to Grandma – a Hogmanay tradition brought from Scotland to Sydney Harbour. Each year we put in orders in for Guinness-glazed ham, a side of homemade gravlax cured with vodka, sugar and salt, a cucumber salad, steamed potatoes with mint, a roast fillet of beef, Mum’s béarnaise sauce and, for me, piroshki and little potato scones for the gravlax. The potato scones are whipped morsels of potato and egg whites, cooked in a frying pan so they have a golden pikelet quality, but lighter (see recipe).

These last two dishes are, to me, the culinary epitome of New Year’s Eve, a necessary family custom that began when I was five or six, when I ate my canapés under the table with my labrador, Winnie. Together, we shared piroshki (see recipe), those doughy bites filled with soft, sweet onions, speck and sometimes sauerkraut.

‘One for me, Winnie, one for you.’ Labradors are good like that.

We balanced glasses and bottles of beer, cheese gougères, still hot from the oven, in our free hands. I always made my way to Grandma’s good friend Lewis Morley, a gentle, talented photographer who took portraits of me in my teens. He told me stories of photographing Charlotte Rampling, the Beatles, Salvador Dali. I swooned. My sister Louise, two years younger than me, and I would chase each other in circles with other kids, playing tip into the summer evening. Years later, we’d sneak a bottle of champagne, with other friends, and lie down on the cool grass into the night.

Bursts of laughter rose towards the darkening sky, a picture from one of the Great Gatsby’s parties. We waited for Sydney’s nine-o’clock fireworks to start, working up a steam and through the canapés, the champagne. The air smelled of summer gardenias and perfume – as it had done every year before.

Guests teetered on heels, navigating the decking and balancing plates piled with Guinness-glazed ham carved from the bone, dill-flecked potato salad, and Mum’s roasted tomatoes with charred capsicum (see recipe). That dish is New Year’s Eve. Barely a week goes by in summer when I don’t have another batch of large red capsicums charring on my gas burner. I spoon it onto toast for breakfast, pack it for lunch with a tin of tuna, and every year I request it for another New Year’s Eve banquet.

Year after year these dishes returned. I did too, in slightly more bizarre outfits as I approached my teens, then with attempts at sophistication since then – more lace, less tulle, more legs, less cleavage, more cleavage, less makeup, tamed hair – but the food stayed the same.

When my dad was a boy, some over-powdered, tweed-wearing New Zealand relative asked him if he was going to get married when he grew up. Instead of skipping the hell out of there as most boys might, he replied, with the assurance of a kid who knew what he wanted:

‘I’m going to marry a Cordon Bleu cook’.

I can picture the ruddy matron now, squeezing his adorable cheeks and ruffling the little head so full of fanciful romantic dreams. Except, when he grew up, he did.

He knew what was good for him. My mother, my grandmother’s only child, took on food as wholeheartedly as her famous mum. And her cooking changed his life. It changed all of our lives. The daily fare that might have turned up on the table, had he chosen another girl in 1969, was instead inventive and extraordinary food. Delicately lifting sheets of homemade shortcrust from a well-floured bench with the hands of a master, my mother kept us all entranced.

As a child and teen, my cooking was akin to taming a lion. I’d nervously throw ingredients together, prod mixtures with a wooden spoon, and the results had the few survivors running away screaming. Mum knew that a soufflé wouldn’t rise even before I’d put it in oven, before I’d placed it in the dish or folded its two ‘halves’ together. She’d step in with a whisk, beat the whites a little more, and deftly pull it together to achieve the desired awed applause.

Sometimes I dreamed up things to eat as a kind of dare to her aptitude. After dinner, dishes all packed away, I’d pose: ‘Wouldn’t a lemon delicious pudding go down well?’

Far from being a slave to our desires, Mum saw it as an opportunity to teach us how to cook. If we wanted something, we’d be there while she made it, zesting lemon rind and adding the milky lemony mixture to the egg whites, buttering the dish.

‘Profiteroles!’ I suggested one morning, hoping she’d get to it as she prepared the evening meal.

‘Uh-huh,’ she replied, getting into the car in her nightie to drive Louise and me to the bus stop for school. But that evening, when I got home, she had laid out a dish of butter cut into cubes, a pot of sugar, a dozen eggs, and an assortment of flours on the kitchen bench.

‘Really?’ I said, disappointed.

‘Prop yourself up there,’ she said, pointing to the corner of the kitchen bench, ‘and just watch.’

Now I can do it. I couldn’t straight away; it took years of not bothering, or ordering in from some French patisserie, or cajoling Mum herself before I finally invested in a pastry bag and a clatter of nozzles. But the image of Mum’s profiteroles that evening has kept me deeply vested in the dish. Arranged on a platter, each choux pastry ball is filled with thick vanilla custard, almost gelatinous and velvety at once, and the lot is drizzled with dark, bitter-sweet chocolate sauce (see recipe).

I have Dad’s wisest possible choice in a future wife and the mother of his children to thank for it.

POTATO SCONES SALMON CAVIAR

See story

MAKES 35

PREPARATION 25 minutes

COOKING 25 minutes

Cover the potatoes with cold water in a large saucepan and cook over medium heat for 10–15 minutes, or until easily pierced with a fork. Drain, then push the potatoes through a ricer, or mash them. Return the potato to the saucepan, add the butter and milk, and mix together well while still hot.

Transfer the mixture to a large bowl to cool, then beat in the sifted flour, egg yolks and sour cream. Season with salt and pepper.

Use an electric mixer to beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then carefully fold the beaten egg white into the potato mixture, using a metal spoon or spatula.

Heat 1 tablespoon of butter in a large, heavy-based frying pan over medium heat. Use two teaspoons to measure out heaped teaspoons of mixture, forming them into rounds.

In batches of four, fry the scones briefly on both sides, until golden, being careful not to flatten them too much. Repeat with the remaining mixture. Transfer the scones to a plate covered with a tea towel (dish towel).

To serve, offer sour cream for dolloping on the scones, salmon caviar for spooning over and snipped chives for sprinkling on top.

PIROSHKI

See story

MAKES About 24

PREPARATION 30 minutes, plus 1 hour 15 minutes proving

COOKING 25 minutes

Put the milk, butter and sugar in a medium saucepan and stir over low heat until the butter has melted.

Sift together the flour and salt in a large mixing bowl and stir in the yeast. Make a well in the flour and pour in the milk mixture. Add the egg yolk and stir from the centre, gradually incorporating a little more flour from the sides. Beat the dough with a wooden spoon for 3 minutes, until smooth and elastic – use your hands if you find it easier. Sprinkle the dough with a little flour and then cover with plastic wrap and a tea towel (dish towel).

Leave in a warm place for 1 hour or until the dough has doubled in size.

For the filling, heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan over medium heat and sauté the onions until tender and slightly golden, being careful not to brown them. Add the speck, sauerkraut and black pepper and cook for 5 minutes on medium–low heat. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 230°C (450°F). Line a baking tray with baking paper.

To assemble the piroshki, turn the dough out onto a floured work surface and knead lightly. Take a tablespoon-sized piece of dough in your hand, flatten it slightly into a thick disc in your palm and place 1 teaspoonful of the filling in the middle. Fold the edges over to enclose the filling, then mould into a small ball. Repeat for the remaining pastry and filling. Put the balls on the prepared tray. Cover with a clean tea towel and leave to prove (rise) in a warm place for about 15 minutes.

Brush the piroshki with egg and bake for 10–15 minutes, or until golden. Serve hot.

These can be made ahead, baked for two-thirds of the time (8–10 minutes), and then frozen in plastic snap-lock bags. Bake from frozen until golden and heated through.

ROASTED TOMATOES CHARRED CAPSICUM

See story

SERVES 4–6

PREPARATION 20 minutes

COOKING 50 minutes

For the charred capsicum, set a large chargrill pan over high heat until very hot. Put the capsicums on the pan and cook, using tongs to rotate, until they are blackened all over. Alternatively, hold one capsicum with tongs over a gas flame, rotating until it is black, then repeat. The skin should be blistered all over. Put the capsicums in a brown paper bag and close at the top, or place in a medium bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Set aside for 20 minutes to steam in their own heat.

Remove and discard the plastic wrap or paper bag, then pull the stalks from the capsicum with the seeds and discard, reserving any juice in a medium bowl. Put them on a board, cut them in half lengthways, and scrape the blackened side with a knife to remove the skins. Tear the capsicum into strips. Transfer to the bowl with the juices, add the garlic, vinegar and olive oil and toss to combine. Cover and set aside for the flavours to develop.

Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F).

Combine the garlic, vinegar, olive oil and basil leaves in a large bowl, add the tomatoes and toss to coat. Marinate for 5–10 minutes, then season with salt to taste.

Arrange the tomatoes, cut-side up, with the basil, garlic and marinade in an ovenproof dish big enough to hold them in one layer. Roast for about 45 minutes, or until soft, then add the capers and stir gently to combine.

Toss the capsicum together with the tomatoes and juices on a serving platter and serve with sourdough.

You can use sherry vinegar instead of raspberry, if you prefer.

PROFITEROLES

See story

MAKES 45

PREPARATION 40 minutes, plus chilling

COOKING 1 hour 15 minutes

For the chocolate sauce, heat the cream in a medium saucepan and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to low. Add the chocolate, stirring gently until melted.

Remove from the heat, stir in the butter and allow the sauce to cool to room temperature. Reheat when needed.

For the crème pâtissière, combine the milk, vanilla beans and seeds in a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove from the heat, cover and set aside.

Beat the egg yolks, flour and cornflour together using an electric mixer. Add the sugar and beat until pale and thick.

Reheat the milk to a simmer, remove the vanilla, then slowly add to the egg yolks, whisking continuously. Return the mixture to a clean saucepan and cook over low heat for 8 minutes, stirring continuously, until thick.

Scrape the vanilla crème into a bowl and cover the surface closely with baking paper before cooling completely.

Preheat the oven to 200°C (400°F). Lightly grease two baking trays.

In a medium saucepan, combine the butter, sugar and salt with 250 ml (9 fl oz/1 cup) water. Bring to the boil, then stir in the flour. Cook, stirring constantly, over medium heat, until the mixture comes away from the sides of the pan.

Transfer to the bowl of an electric mixer and leave to cool slightly. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, on low speed, until the mixture is shiny and smooth.

Use a piping bag with a plain 1.5 cm (⁵/₈ in) nozzle to pipe high mounds, about 2.5 cm (1 in) wide, onto the prepared trays, leaving space between for spreading. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 190°C (375°F) and bake for a further 10 minutes, or until golden brown and crisp. Turn off the oven and leave the profiteroles to cool in the oven.

Pipe crème pâtissière in through the base of the profiteroles. Arrange on a platter, then drizzle over hot chocolate sauce.

This makes 45 profiteroles. You can freeze half the batch of unfilled puffs in an airtight container for another time, and only make half the quantity of crème pâtissière.

NEW AUSTRALIANS

From the age of two, Margaret, her older siblings and her parents lived in Glen Innes, a town about 600 kilometres north of Sydney. Her father was a tailor and the children were dressed impeccably in sensible Scottish wool and sturdy leather. Margaret always wanted to wear something pink as a little girl and – pushing it – some patent leather shoes.

Other girls didn’t wear tweed overcoats and lace-up brown shoes with buttons, they weren’t nicknamed ‘Scotch’. Other girls were not immigrants, whose father had packed up his entire family, overhauling life plans on the say-so of a letter from a fellow tailor who had moved from Scotland to Australia and found wealth (as a farmer, he neglected to note). Other girls didn’t have little velour hats like the ones worn by the English Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose: they were different. Margaret was different.

Two of her three brothers also longed to be like the local boys, who stumbled out of bed at dawn, year round, milked the cows and then rode their horses ten kilometres to where the bus picked them up for school. These eight- and ten-year-olds’ heads fell into the crook of their elbows during class, their red and rough hands falling limp as they slept at their desks. John and Alex Fulton envied their hardship, coveted their position on the brink of manhood.

Meanwhile, Margaret joined the swathes of immigrants who were yet to be wholly accepted in small Australian country towns, but who were beginning to form part of the structure of things. Chinese migrants ran the local department store, Kwong Sing’s; Greeks ran the Paragon Café; Lebanese ran the draper’s shop – and the local tailor was a Scot.

‘The Australian children called us Scotch, Chink, Dago, worse. But it didn’t matter, everyone had their adversities, and that wasn’t so bad,’ she tells me.

When her father told her stories of Scottish heroes, she felt much less of an outsider.

‘I went home to hear stories of William Wallace, or red-headed Scottish warriors withstanding the Romans, tales of Robert the Bruce, and I was proud of where I’d come from.’

‘Queen Margaret was my namesake,’ she says.

Her parents claimed it was this wife of Malcolm, King of the Scots – who spent her childhood in Hungary; introduced spiced meat and French wines to the court in 1066; brought ballads, singing and dancing to the stiff-collared aristocracy – whom she could thank for her name.

‘But it’s more likely I was named after Aunt Maggie, my mother’s older sister,’ she chuckles to herself.

As the Great Depression pushed more people out of work, men travelled into small towns looking for jobs, often arriving at Margaret’s father’s tailor shop to see if he could use them; a shilling or two was better than starving. He found odds and ends for them: re-rolling fabric and sharpening scissors, sweeping floors and tinkering with plumbing. When their token chores were done and he handed them something for their work, Alexander sent them on to his wife, giving them directions and suggesting they may be useful there. They pulled weeds from the garden and beat the dust from rugs, polished cutlery and pruned trees.

Families pulled together meals from the cheapest cuts, and tripe – the rippled insides of a cow’s stomach – appeared on tables everywhere. Tripe and onions, boiled into a stew, became a popular staple during the Depression and while her friends hated the dish, Margaret loved how her mother made it. The flavours enveloped each other, rich and textured. Bread and dripping were served with mutton for bulking up meals and mopping up juices. Bread was often saved for dessert if treacle was on hand, a sweet, luxurious treat.

‘Australian women became very adept,’ says Margaret now. ‘They had very little at this time, but they made the effort, especially when a guest was coming. It wasn’t uncommon to travel three or four hours to have afternoon tea. So you had the feeling that you had to do something really proper and special. It’s not as though you could run down to the shops to pick up a cake. Women took a lot of pride in their skills in the kitchen.’

Margaret’s mother Isabella was no different. She took her recipe cues from the Country Women’s Association and the Presbyterian Women’s Association cookbooks, learning new ways to bake. She stumbled over the chocolate cakes and sponges her Australian peers had mastered – it didn’t come naturally. Margaret envied her friends who arrived home to jam tarts and gingerbread cake; she was handed an apple when she walked in the door. There was usually shortbread, that crumbly and buttery Scottish biscuit, and Dundee cake, a dense fruitcake that Margaret adored, but both were for special occasions, for guests who travelled miles for afternoon tea.

Sitting with a bowl on her lap in the afternoon, Isabella used her hands to beat butter and sugar until it resembled whipped cream, to make one baked thing she did perfectly: shortbread. The warmth of her hands softened the butter as she pinched her fingers into a whisk shape – no utensils needed. Scots often add ground rice to their shortbread, giving the whole thing a coarse grittiness. But the texture also comes from using coarse flour, hand-ground where possible. Margaret and her sisters never agreed on how their mother made the recipe, what was ‘proper’. So from this brood of children came a handful of different recipes for shortbread, and each continued to make her own version of their mother’s recipe throughout their lives. Catherine, Margaret’s oldest sister (‘She makes a very good shortbread,’ says Margaret diplomatically), doesn’t knead the shortbread, but Margaret remembers her mother working away at it in a bowl, ‘so I knead’. Jean, Margaret’s closest sister in age, ‘kneads a little bit’. But Margaret says it’s important not to knead the dough too much nor overwork it.

‘It needs lightness of hand and good judgment. If the ingredients are worked too much, shortbread becomes tough and chewy, instead of short and melting in the mouth.’ (See recipe).

Jam tart shortages aside, there was food. Baskets of lemons, beef heart tomatoes, bunches of basil and rosemary, green beans and yellow squash, baby zucchini and tamarillos, spinach, silverbeet and guavas arrived in great bounty at the door. In lieu of actually paying Alexander for his work as a tailor, customers often turned up to the house loaded with boxes of produce from their gardens. There were cabbages and turnips, carrots and even fish that people caught themselves, all offerings in place of money. When they grew nothing, customers found other ways to pay. Many baked. While the Fulton clan was not exactly rolling in money, there was always plenty to eat.

Margaret’s mother had a way to use everything. She found something to love in every onion, stalk of celery and bunch of carrots, and giant pots of stock sat on the stove all afternoon, barely simmering, to create bases for soups and stews.

One day Margaret opened the door to a stranger, an apron wrapped tightly around his portly shape.

‘Hello, dear, could you please open the door as wide as possible,’ and he gestured to his right, out of Margaret’s view. She slipped out the door and almost ran into a teenage boy with a whole creature slung over his shoulder.

‘It’s for your mother, love. Yer father said to just bring it on up here, said to put it in the kitchen. It’s payment for the work he’s been doin’ for us.’

‘Oh!’ said Margaret. ‘Yes, please follow me.’

And the young man traipsed after her through the house, a whole lamb, skinned and gutted, over his shoulder. He laid the carcass on the kitchen table in the middle of the room, nodded at Margaret, and walked back through the house.

All of this bartered food was hand-reared and homegrown, homemade. We tend to remember vividly our first taste of fresh-pickled pine mushrooms, fresh baby peas right out of the pod, homegrown sorrel folded into butter and slipped under the skin of a pasture-fed chicken. And having eaten Mrs Magoo from Glen Innes’ chocolate cake – a most perfect combination of dense and rich – and the freshly picked produce arriving at the door, Margaret rebelled against anything that would put her in the way of eating ordinary. The more hand-reared baby milk-fed lamb and beetroots straight from Mr Bluster’s garden she was given, the more heightened her senses, the stronger her appetite for good ingredients.

Isabella was an alchemist in the kitchen, and followed her countrymen’s tradition of turning food that might seem to be lead into gold. What was a humble shoulder of lamb or mutton neck, an unlovely strip of stomach, became complex broths and wonderful brews. Margaret witnessed tough, veiny hunks of meat go into the oven and come out, hours later, the sauce reduced and the meat darkened, sweet, salty, transformed.

She didn’t make haggis, though. In Scotland, butchers tackled the complex procedure themselves, and the family bought it for New Year’s celebrations to have with ‘neeps and tatties’ – mashed turnip and potato, lots of butter. But in Australia, it was not so readily available.

What is haggis? It’s the butt of culinary jokes about Scottish people, for one. It’s the Thing Never To Be Eaten Under Any Circumstances for culinary cowards. And it does sound terrifying to the uninitiated: a hot sticky mix of sheep’s ‘pluck’ (the whole oesophagus, lungs, heart and liver, yanked from the sheep in one go) finely ground and mixed with oatmeal, chopped onions, lots of black pepper. The gooey filling is stuffed inside a sheep’s stomach, steamed slowly and then whisked into the oven. Then, the stomach peeled back and the innards revealed, it’s served hot. A dram of single malt works well with it (more as a lick of courage than anything else). There’s no romantic way to write about it. On paper it’s barbaric, but the reality is quite the opposite.

Margaret’s mother did turn to another Scottish classic for her brood, however: Scotch broth. It is indeed a broth, but with carrots and other root vegetables, lamb slowly cooked so the gnarly fatty bits, the shin or neck, fall from the bone and become so tender, so remarkably soft and flavoursome that the Scots have handed the dish their country’s name in its honour (see recipe).

Isabella took a saw and sharp knives to the whole lamb and butchered it herself. Lamb shoulders and neck, trimmings, ribs, chops – the family ate lamb in various guises for weeks. Margaret watched her mother create the broth, as she had done many times before. She sautéed vegetables in butter until they turned aromatic and golden, added the lamb’s ‘lesser’ cuts with stock and barley, and simmered the lot for three or four hours. It was this broth that was simmering gently when two strangers came for dinner.

The sound of whispering in the kitchen drew Margaret across the house. She recognised her parents’ voices, but there were other voices too, hushed but emphatic. When she entered the kitchen, two men stood up from the kitchen table suddenly. They held their coats in front of them, their skinny frames draped in clothes a few sizes too big. Margaret smiled and, as she drew nearer, saw the deep lines in their faces, which were brown and worn. Their hands were rough and blackened and their slender necks too old, their eyes too sad for their years. It was not the first time men like this had stood in the kitchen. They dropped their eyes when they saw her.

Isabella, Alexander and the six siblings joined their guests at the table that evening. Isabella asked the children how their days had been, and the boys beamed about their neighbour’s offer of one of their horses to ride one weekend. Isabella spoke of a recipe she’d heard about on the wireless. The communal chatter warmed the small room. Margaret’s father asked the guests where they’d been looking for work, where they would head next. These men were going for days without anything to eat. They’d left their families behind in search of work, sending money back where they could. The Fultons scrimped to pay for electricity, and fabrics for clothes were not easy to come by – but they would eat, and they had each other at the table.

SCOTTISH SHORTBREAD

See story

MAKES 36 x 6 cm (2½ in) round shortbreads

PREPARATION 30 minutes

COOKING 30 minutes

Preheat the oven to 160°C (315°F). Lightly grease two baking trays and line with baking paper.

Use an electric mixer to cream the butter until pale, then gradually add the sugar, beating the mixture until it is pale and creamy.

Gradually work in the flour and cornflour, then knead for about 5 minutes, until it becomes a very smooth dough.

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured work surface until it is 5–6 mm (¼ in) thick and use a 6 cm (2½ in) fluted round cutter to cut out rounds. Put on the prepared trays and use a fork to prick shortbread in a decorative pattern. Dust lightly with extra caster sugar.

Bake the shortbread in the lower half of the oven for 25–30 minutes, or until very lightly coloured and crisp, swapping trays halfway through for even baking. Cool on the trays for 10 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks.