Celebrated food writer Margaret Fulton has died aged 94.

Key points: Beloved food writer Margaret Fulton was referred to as "Australia's original domestic goddess"

Beloved food writer Margaret Fulton was referred to as "Australia's original domestic goddess" Born in Scotland, Fulton travelled extensively and brought everything she learned to her cooking and to her writing

Born in Scotland, Fulton travelled extensively and brought everything she learned to her cooking and to her writing She was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1983 for her services to journalism and cookery

Her family said they were "mourning the loss of their loving, inspirational and treasured mother, grandmother and great-grandmother early this morning".

Fulton was best-known for The Margaret Fulton Cookbook in 1968, and was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 1983.

Generations of Australians can thank Fulton for injecting zest and flair into their cooking long before celebrity chefs populated Australian TV screens.

Through her wildly popular cookbooks, she introduced a post-war nation brought up on meat and three veg to the exotic flavours of Italian, French, Greek, Spanish, and Chinese cuisine.

Margaret Fulton brought international cuisine to Australia through her wildly popular cookbooks. ( Facebook: National Portrait Gallery )

More than 1.5 million copies of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook have perched on kitchen counters as hungry people, young and old, followed her instructions to bake, whip, stir, toss, and beat.

"I think Australians responded to this enormous excitement that I was feeling about food and they were feeling it too," Fulton said in a 1997 television interview.

Not only was Fulton a prolific cookery book writer — she wrote more than 20 books — she was also food editor for Woman's Day magazine, one of the first in the industry to be a cook and a journalist at the same time.

"I've been showing women how to bake a scone and keep a man; yes, that comes into it because it's all part of life," she said when honoured on her 93rd birthday.

'Australia's original domestic goddess'

In a career spanning multiple decades, Fulton had a finger in every pie.

She was a teacher, a cook, a journalist, a writer, an account executive, a pressure-cooker salesperson, and a solo parent.

Fulton travelled extensively, bringing to life the recipes she collected along the way through her writing and television cooking shows.

She was, as the now-folded Bulletin once wrote, "Australia's original domestic goddess".

"I often break the rules with cookery and I live to regret it," Fulton said.

"You think, 'I'll take a shortcut' and it doesn't work but then, if I weren't the type of person who took a shortcut, I wouldn't be the kind of person I am."

Margaret Fulton's scone recipe, from her eponymous cookbook, is a favourite with many. ( ABC News: Jennifer King )

Frugal childhood was foundation

Margaret Isobel Fulton was born in Nairn, Scotland on October 10, 1924, the youngest of six children.

When she was three, the family moved to the New South Wales town of Glen Innes where her father worked as a tailor.

Fulton and her siblings grew up during the Depression wearing Scottish wool, but the family scrimped to pay bills.

They moved into a small cottage with a toilet and bathroom in a tin shed out the back and a tin tub and washboard as a laundry.

As Fulton recalled in a 1997 interview with the Australian Biography project, her mother's first impression was one of "total shock".

"Where's the kitchen? The kitchen looked like a shed to me with a fuel stove," she said.

"And my mother was saying, 'Where do you wash? There's no sink'.

"The toilet was a thing in a wee shed in the back garden. The laundry was just a bit of corrugated iron.

Fulton's life may have taken a different course were it not for a hand injury. ( Wikimedia Commons: Eva Rinaldi Photography )

"She made a marvellous fist of coming to grips with this very alien community."

Not only was she influenced by her mother's ability to create delicious meals from the cheapest cuts of meat, Fulton was also inspired by a wealthy local family's cook.

She was regularly invited to play with the family's daughters because she "spoke nicely" but the cook, who had been brought over from England, was more interesting.

"I wanted to be with the cook who was making lovely raised pies," Fulton said.

"That was the first time I'd seen very intricate cooking being done and I discovered this wonderful world."

The young Fulton was also a keen piano player, but in the run-up to a piano exam her sports mistress — who did not like her — encouraged the school bully to wack her hand with a hockey stick.

"I always say, my brilliant career was banged on the thumb but ... the world lost a very second-rate piano teacher or pianist and got a very good cook," Fulton said.

Loading...

Life on the riverbank

In 1942, aged 18 and standing five feet tall (152cm), Fulton boarded a train to Sydney with plans to become a dress designer or a Bluebell Girl, "kicking my way across the stage in Paris".

She ended up working in a parachute factory before becoming a clerk with AGL where she "had to try not to fall asleep after lunch".

After a transfer to AGL's cookery division, Fulton said she never fell asleep again because she loved it so much.

She was the first person to teach visually impaired people how to cook, a turning point in her life because she learned what teaching was and could be.

When her boyfriend Trevor Wilfred-Price proposed marriage in 1948, she said yes.

Margaret Fulton began her long career as a cookery demonstrator with AGL in Sydney in the 1940s. ( Facebook: Margaret Fulton, I Sang For My Supper )

The couple had one child, Suzanne, but the marriage was not a happy one. Soon, Fulton had left her husband and moved into a cottage on the Hawkesbury River with her married sister.

They swapped oranges for fish and foraged for food, living off prawns and oysters straight from the river, wild asparagus, and spinach.

Fulton would jump trains or hitchhike from Mooney Mooney to Sydney — once even offered a ride by a hearse with a body in the back — to launch a new career.

From advertising to Queen of the Dessert

While Fulton recognised her mother as her first teacher in the art of cooking, she credited Australian journalist and poet Elizabeth Riddell with kickstarting her career as a food writer.

Loading...

"I went along and applied for the job [as a cookery editor for a women's magazine] and a marvellous person interviewed me. It was Elizabeth Riddell," she told Australian Biography.

"I got the job on the strength of making handmade bread rolls and a few other things. But it started my career in newspapers and women's magazines."

From cookery editor, she moved across to advertising on the advice of her brother-in-law who told her, "Margaret, go where the money is".

She started as a copy writer but soon became an account executive with JWT — a rare woman in that position at the time — and learned valuable marketing skills on accounts like Kraft, Kellogg's and the Australian Women's Weekly.

However, an unfortunate incident with a German filmmaker and a bowl of Rice Bubbles was a trigger to accept a job from Woman's Day.

"I thought, 'I don't want anyone bellowing at me. He may be a German count and a brilliant filmmaker ... so I said goodbye," she said.

Having an eye for enterprise, Fulton made the most of her experiences working in advertising to establish and promote herself as a leading food expert in the country.

Margaret Fulton OAM was a career woman, a 'National Living Treasure' and the subject of a musical. ( Supplied: James Cant )

However, she said she was not a good businesswoman and lost a lot of money throughout her career, including in a failed pre-prepared food business.

"I've never had an agent, I've never done clever things that I perhaps should have done — but I write books. I'm not a businesswoman," she said.

"You know, I'm something but I could have been a lot better off if I had taken a more aggressive interest in my business affairs."

Fulton married Irish actor Denis Doonan in 1960 but her great love was English actor Michael McKeag, with whom she spent eight years before his death in 1988 from lung cancer.

"The best thing in life is working and writing recipes, and chopping and stirring and all of those things," she said.

"But I learnt that life shared with someone, the right person, is simply great."

Fulton was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1983 for her services to journalism and cookery and in 1998, was added to the National Trust's list of 100 Australian Living Treasures.

In 2006, the Bulletin listed her as one of the country's most influential people. A musical, Margaret Fulton: Queen of The Dessert, highlighted her lesser-known bohemian life away from the cameras.