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.