"I didn't want to be a cook, I wanted to be a showgirl, but my little five-foot Scottish frame didn't say much for that," Fulton once said.

When a musical was written about her life, the showgirl in Fulton gave it the tick of approval.

"I never thought it would happen ... now I have to buy a frock for opening night," she said.

First staged in 2012, as Margaret Fulton: Queen of Desserts, it's toured ever since, and now Jally Entertainment is taking Margaret Fulton the Musical on the road again, a sign perhaps of Fulton's endearing legacy.

Fulton saw some early workshops of this production before she died in 2019, says producer Alli Pope.

"She was thrilled by what we've done with it," Pope says. "It was such a pleasure meeting her and an honour to bring her life to stage once again."

And what a life it was. Most people think of Fulton as this grand-motherly woman who wrote a few cookbooks but she was a trail-blazer, both in and out of the kitchen.

Born in Scotland, she emigrated to Australia with her parents at the age of three. Out of school she left for Sydney, working in a parachute factory as World War II wound up. In 1947, Fulton met a woman through mutual friends, Olwen Francis, who was the cookery editor of The Australian Women's Weekly. "After the war, food, energy and cosmetics will grow, and these will be the areas for the new progressive woman," Francis told her.

Fulton liked the idea of the "new progressive woman", returned to the parachute factory and resigned and took a new position with the Australian Gas Light Company, first as a clerk, and later in the Home Service Department, where it was her job to teach women how to save gas and use the company's appliances, so she would make scones and patty cakes and sponges to show how gas achieved the best results. A life-long career was born.

She began working in magazines and in 1968 she published The Margaret Fulton Cookbook and it changed the way Australians ate, introducing a meat and three veg nation to such wonders as spaghetti bolognese, nasi goreng and fondue.

But she was also a single mother, raising her daughter Susan on her own after her first marriage fell apart. There was another divorce - she once joked she had more husbands than jobs - and alleged ties to the Communist Party.

"Fulton lived a very full, very exciting life," says Pope. "When it was first offered to us to produce, and we've been touring shows around the country since 2008, shows such as The Producers, Calendar Girls, Menopause the Musical, what I call bums-on-seats shows, I thought, 'I really dig Margaret Fulton, she's great but I can't imagine a food writer's life being a full blown musical'. But I read the script and I couldn't put it down, it was that good."

The story goes that comedy writer Doug MacLeod (Kath and Kim, Full Frontal) went to pitch a television special to Fulton, but left her house with a stomach full of her Anzac biscuits, no deal and the shell of a musical. Yuri Worontschak (Mad as Hell) composed the music and there are several catchy numbers.

"There's a song called Pressure Cooker that's good enough to release on its own," says Pope. "And another called Jam about the sugar industry and some beautiful ballads about her mother's passing and numbers about her early life in Sydney, there's really something for everyone as far as the music goes."

For this production Judy Hainsworth takes the role of Fulton. One of Brisbane's most dynamic performers and writers, she is the creator of #FirstWorldWhiteGirls (Brisbane Comedy Festival, Melbourne Comedy Festival, Adelaide Fringe) and a member of Matilda Award-winning cabaret group, Babushka. Her theatre credits include Revolting Rhymes & Dirty Beasts and The Narcissist, which earned her a Matilda Award nomination for best supporting actress.

"When we were auditioning I just knew Judy was right," says Pope. "She the same stature, tiny, but this big personality and this big voice.

"We laugh because Judy admits she wasn't much of a cook before she took the role, but she read Fulton's autobiography I Sang for My Supper, which the play is based on, and bought some of her cookbooks and spent 2020 cooking up a storm."

It's been more than 50 years since Fulton published that first cookbook, but this is the effect she still has on people, she makes the kitchen feel like a safe, doable, place. In this instance the kitchen is on stage, and while there might be a few surprises in store, the audience feels very much at home there.

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