Margaret Fulton - Margaret Fulton Favourites: The Much-Loved, Essential Recipes from a Lifetime of Cooking

Margaret Fulton
favourites

Margaret Fulton

favourites

The much-loved, essential
recipes from a lifetime of cooking

Margaret Fulton
Suzanne Gibbs

Photography by Tanya Zouev

First published in 2007 as Margaret Fulton's Kitchen
This edition published in 2010 by
Hardie Grant Books
85 High Street
Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia
www.hardiegrant.com.au

Cover and internal design concept: Steve Smedley
Designer: Susanne Geppert
Photography: Tanya Zouev, Armelle Habib
Stylist: Caroline Velik

Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN 13: 978 174066 906 1

Colour reproduction by Splitting Image Colour Studio
Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing.

Copyright text Margaret Fulton 2007
Copyright photographs Tanya Zouev 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

From the library of Margaret Fulton: the first page of a handwritten cookbook created for the Duke of Norfolks estate, dated 1733.

This book is about food, life and sharing and
is dedicated to our dear friend Jannie Brown.

Contents

Fish please, a small but assured voice piped up to the bemused waiter. My parents and older siblings could hardly believe their ears and burst into peals of laughter. I was three years old. Until then I had seldom uttered a word, let alone with such confidence.

Back then none of us could imagine how food would end up shaping my life. Growing up in country New South Wales we were lucky to have access to wonderful lamb, beef, poultry, raised as it should be, fresh garden vegetables and fruit from local orchards. And I was lucky to grow up with the sublime food that came out of my mothers kitchen. Her desire to cook delicious meals for her family was matched by her determination to obtain the best-quality produce.

My fascination with food and early indoctrination into mealtime preparation necessary in a family of eight set me firmly on a path towards a life of food and cooking. I have been able to spread the word that cooking is a most rewarding pleasure. Knowing a little about the background traditions, places and people behind a dish opens up a whole new world of interest and understanding.

Travel has had a huge influence on the way I view food and on the food that I cook. I have spent many working holidays overseas, and the best part has always been returning home with a wonderful fund of information and recipes from other cooks and nations. I first visited China in the 1970s, and remember learning from young chefs and also venerable masters. In the rural communes I was introduced to the most simple but beautiful foods locally caught carp steamed with the finest angel hairs of ginger and aromatics as refined as any dish in a top restaurant. I have equally fond memories of trips to India, where the food, people and customs simply captured my imagination. Today I often yearn for Indian food, but am also influenced by the wide and varied cuisines of Malaysia, Thailand, France, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia, having watched, and learnt from, the best local cooks in these places.

I enjoy making the French dishes I learnt when studying a course based on the great French master of the kitchen Auguste Escoffier. And I still cook with the French copper saucepans I bought in Paris more than 50 years ago.

For this book, I have sorted through a lifetime of recipes and chosen those I thought best and most representative of a half-century of cooking: the food I cook regularly, the dishes my family and friends like, and the recipes that readers have asked me for time and time again. All the love, experience and knowledge garnered from my family, and from people all over the world make up a big part of this book.

My kitchen has always been a happy place for me, my family and friends. Cooking together brings such joy I loved the hours spent in the kitchen with my mother as a child, shelling peas, kneading dough and helping stir the pot, and I continued this tradition with my own daughter, Suzanne. Its been a pleasure to work alongside Suzanne on this and a number of cookbooks. I hope you enjoy the stories, food and recipes from my kitchen as much as we have in putting this book together.

Soups, Starters
and Appetisers

I do love soup. I always have. Real homemade soup is so rarely served these days that when it is encountered it is truly welcomed by those who appreciate good food.

Soups are so easy to prepare and, because they can be created ahead of time, make mealtimes a great deal simpler if you lead a busy life. Any vegetable can be lightly sauted in butter or oil and then cooked with stock before being pured to make a great-tasting soup the possibilities are endless.

Go to the effort of making a big batch of stock, then freeze it in recipe-size portions in plastic containers so that the stock is ready to use at any time. Or keep packets of concentrated stock on hand the next best thing in terms of quality. A word of advice when using commercial stocks is to go easy on the seasoning, especially salt.

All soups benefit from a finishing touch chopped herbs, a slice of lemon, a swirl of cream, a nut of butter or a sprinkling of crunchy croutons a little something to say, this is special.

Whole Chicken and Leek Soup

Like most Scots, I take the making of soup very seriously. Cock-a-leekie, or whole chicken and leek soup, is a close relative of the famous Jewish chicken soup that wonderfully comforting cure-all otherwise known as Jewish penicillin.

In the Scottish version, rice or barley is sometimes substituted for potatoes, and while the dish is almost always made with an older bird what we call a boiler for best results spend a little extra and get an organic, free-range one.

1 size 15 (1.5 kg) chicken water or Chicken Stock

1 onion, peeled

1 carrot, cut into chunks

2 stalks celery, sliced