real life

"I want to be a better person because of what she did"

The photo was taken by Sarah from www.abeachcottage.com

In this day of celebrity worship, the word ‘hero’ has been dumbed down – a lot. I tend to take my heroes more seriously. I want to be profoundly influenced by them and I want to change my behaviour because their story touched my life. I want to be a better person because of what they did, so I use the word ‘hero’ very sparingly. In fact, I only have three: Nelson Mandela, The Dalai Lama and Margaret Fulton.

Ahh, Margaret Fulton.

My own cooking journey began on my 17th  birthday when a school friend gave me a copy of Margaret Fulton’s world-famous cookbook. It was the very first cookbook I ever had of my own and from it I learnt how to make a decent crêpe and how to carve a roast. I started reading her weekly cooking column in  Women’s Day long before it became fashionable to follow a celebrity chef. Margaret Fulton was neither celebrity nor a chef; she was simply getting on with the business of teaching a nation how to cook. She revolutionised our food habits, introduced us to other household names like Charmaine and Stephanie and Maggie and graciously made way for emerging talent and the blistering growth in the nation’s food awareness in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now sometimes life hands you a diamond and one day last month, I opened my emails and saw an invitation to come (with three other food bloggers) to cook with Suzanne Gibbs.

Suzanne Gibbs is a gifted cook and cookbook author in her own right. She is Food Editor at BBC Australian Good Food magazine.  She’s a qualified Cordon Bleu chef. She’s written several books including The Thrifty Kitchen and The Pressure Cooker Recipe Book. But she also happens to have an extremely famous mother (with the initials MF!) and we were all fully aware of her background, not least because Gibbs referenced it, casually saying, “This is the Fulton family birthday cake” as she made a delicious chocolate, berry and cream roulade.

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So there I was one day cooking in Margaret Fulton’s daughter’s kitchen thinking, I can’t believe I’m finally getting to use a Kitchenaid mixer. In Suzanne Gibbs’ kitchen! And then I heard a collective gasp from the bloggers and I turned around.

Margaret Fulton was standing not three-metres away from me. My swagger left me as my knees wobbled and I stepped backwards and plopped onto a kitchen stool, as you do when one of your lifetime heroes walks into the kitchen. In that moment, I was 17 again.

I said the first thing that came to mind: “It’s an honour to meet you.”

She looked at me, a smile on her face that didn’t quite go to her eyes, and said, “Oh.”

One by one she was introduced to us. She looked a little bewildered when her daughter said, “See Mum, this is the new way of food writing” when referring to our  blogs. Then she sat down in a comfy corner of the room and started to knit.  I went back to the kitchen and it struck me that if an 87-year-old woman – who taught much of the western world to cook – could be herself in this house then so could I. I did the washing up and I left her alone until there was a quieter opportunity to talk.

Later, I sidled up to her and asked if it would be all right if I talked to her and in the conversation that followed, the lovely photo at the top of this post was taken. We talked about the simple pleasures of watching small children eat mangoes, of Woody Allen movies and Shetland wool and she named-dropped shamelessly and it was all rather breathtaking. I completely forgot to ask her the one question I should have asked: What advice could you give me, a cookbook author about to launch her first book?

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Then the four excited bloggers, Suzanne Gibbs and a couple of triumphant PR babes sat at the dining table with a pot of tea and all the creamy goodies we had made and we had afternoon tea with Margaret Fulton, who chatted and tasted every single dish and complimented it all. She didn’t miss a trick. She was unfailingly kind and helpful.

And when our afternoon in that wonderful house was over we bloggers left and stood outside in the narrow street and talked as we tried to make sense of the truly awesome events of the day. It was then that I remembered one of my favourite passages from Margaret Fulton’s cookbooks:

“I’d rather have a couple of well-cooked chops than a badly cooked expensive steak.”

I’ve never forgotten it. It crystallised my views about eating thriftily and honouring the food I ate by preparing it well and enjoying the meal that follows. Meeting my hero wasn’t just a publicity exercise – it was confirmation of some of my core values. It was validation that more than anything else, I’m on the right track.

It was, in fact, a gift of diamonds.

So here, paraphrased, are some homespun pearls of wisdom I gleaned from one of my great heroes:

  • Always have something to serve with a cup of tea when friends drop by.
  • Be generous with your friendship.
  • Be especially kind to the new generation of cooks and writers, even if you’re not quite sure what a blog is.
  • Knit with good wool.
  • Savour the best of new season mangos.
  • Put your family first.
  • Never be afraid of hard work.
  • Get a good accountant.
  • Practise yoga to stay bendy in old age.

Known to MM readers as La Petite Chou, Sandra Reynolds started writing a blog called The $120 Food Challenge . She has now written over 870 recipes, survived unemployment and Newstart payments, media notoriety and Aldi checkout queues and is now working on her second cookbook.

Who are your heroes?  What have you learned from them?