AustLit

'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)