Margaret McHugh: forthright and then some . . .

A cook who knows where to apply heat . . . Michael Fallow looks into the life of Margaret McHugh.

Let’s call Margaret McHugh troublesome – she won’t mind. And in any case the oh-socommonly applied description ‘‘forthright’’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

Her new autobiography/cookbook book The Real McHugh stands tangy testimony to her ability to apply heat, spice and dashes of sauciness as artfully in her storytelling as in her cooking.

Nowadays Picton-based, she’s a chef sprung from Winton whose already strong sense of independence was further liberated in 1970 London’s stillswinging South Kensington, before she returned to Queenstown where she became a firebrand councillor and deputy mayor.

Hers was a happy upbringing enhanced by good farm cooking centred around the always-alive coal range.

Picture, if you will, a young girl waking to fresh-from-the-oven lamb. Live ones, mind you.

They had gone into the warm opendoor environs half frozen and emerged the next day fighting fit, toddling around the kitchen for a look before returning to the fields.

She grew up learning about good food though the boys on the school bus had their own view about her juvenile palate, twice a day joining in that classic refrain: ‘‘Catholic dogs, sitting on logs, eating the gutses out of frogs’’.

To be clear, this was hardly a childhood trauma.

She lambasts modern-day mollycoddling with the confidence of one who, even as a child, always felt comfortable in her own skin.

Even so, taunts required response. Hers drew just enough blood that it was deemed best she sit right up front with the driver.

Speaking by phone, she laughs at the life lesson.

‘‘The naughtiest girl on the bus gets the best seat on the bus.’’

Speaking of naughtiness, as a pupil in the cloistered environment of St Philomena’s in Dunedin, she read about some carry-on in Britain that piqued her curiosity enough to later ask her mum what she knew about Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies.

A detailed answer would have been that they were two young women central to the 1963 Profumo scandal involving a Government minister and socially unsanctioned rumpy-pumpy.

Her mother’s explanation was more pithy

‘‘Dirty, dirty girls.’’

By 1970, living in South Kensington, working at the Turk’s Head, she came to know Rice-Davies as a regular, and occasionally Keeler, who struck her as less stylish but who showed a rather flattering interest in her.

Here McHugh’s storytelling forays well away from anything you’re likely to read in an Alison Holst-styled book. She recalls Keeler inviting her along to a gettogether that had orgiastic intimations. Declined, we should add.

It was a vibrant time, living above the Turk’s Head in an exceedingly posh part of town.

Once, hastening with places to go and things to do, she bustled purposefully past a young man and an older figure – her reliably pleasant neighbour, who’d struck her as a well-dressed sailor type.

Her colleagues were swift to tell her she was a Kiwi peasant.

That pair who had to make way were Lord Mountbatten and his nephew, Charles.

Europe was close at hand but by the end of 1973 she was to be found among Greek hosts during the Athens student uprising against the ruling junta. Amid the turmoil, their son lay dead in the street below, his throat cut.

Might be time to come home. Her dad certainly thought so.

Before long she was working in Queenstown as a sous chef at the Skyline. Later , contract caterer on the TSS Earnslaw where, let’s just say, ‘‘we made our own fun’’.

Come 1985 she scraped on to the Queenstown Lakes District Council by fully 11 votes, which it turns out was a margin gratifyingly similar to the number of her regular bar buddies at Wicked Willies.

Her four terms on the council were never going to be placid and there was an arguably inevitable lawsuit threat resolved by ‘‘a very insincere apology’’.

She also rails against and far-fromoccasional instances of brown-nosing, coercion and bullying.

McHugh would reliably vote against going into committee as it was so often done to ‘‘protect staff and councillors’ arses and do deals behind closed doors’’.

She writes of one councillor complaining about her comments while rolling on the balls of his feet and with hands thrust in his pockets, the sight of which prompted her to raise a point of order, objecting to him ‘‘having a good time at my expense.’’

Councillors, she contends, need to shrug off work pushed at them by the administration, disregard the calls to see themselves as essentially part of a team, and should instead focus on strengthening their connections to the people they’re meant to be representing.

After four terms she resigned and soon moved to Auckland where she ran a delicatessen and out-catering business for eight years.

In time she and her partner, Bill Brown, tied the knot – their relationship already two years’ established after she’d caught his eye with her ‘‘big hair, big lipstick, diamonds sparkling on her fingers and a large gin in her hand, holding court . . .’’

And how did they spend their honeymoon? Apart. She was at sea with a boatful of blokes.

McHugh had long wanted to do the ship-on-high-seas thing but not on an overcrowded cruise ship with its noise and nonsense.

Instead, seizing a two-month opportunity, the new bride found herself furiously reciting the rosary out of vertiginous fear as she climbed the steep gangway to the mighty container ship – CMA CGM Alexandra Von Huboldt. The length of four footy fields. Just her, 16,000 containers, 16 Filipino crew and 8 Croatian officers.

Settle down.

‘‘They were the loveliest guys,’’ she recalls on the phone. Her cooking was gratifyingly appreciated and throughout the trip ‘‘they were respectful and I was respectful.’’

She made sure they had dessert every night and she didn’t talk too much.

Men, she airily adds, like peace and quiet. Unless they’re on the prowl.

‘‘I know men. I know how to get on with them and keep them at arm’s length with a smile on my face rather than a peg on my nose.’’

It’s a bit of an art, but she finds they appreciate it.

Where McHugh does get in trouble, it’s often in circumstances that don’t have her feeling troubled.

Not even when, by this stage operating the Gourmet Food Store in Picton, she engaged in an email exchange with a customer – who struck her as a tad too entitled – that resulted in international news enlivened by such McHughian observations as: ‘‘You were probably bottle-fed til late teens’’.

If Margaret McHugh ran the world, or at least was more persuasive in it, we’d certainly eat better, and there would also be a good deal less helicopter parenting and general sense of entitlement.

She doesn’t contribute to food banks. She does, however, drop notes into the slots saying she’s willing to teach the holder, free, how to cook for themselves. Nobody’s ever taken her up, she says. Apparently what they really want is biscuits.

McHugh would reliably vote against going into committee as it was so often done to ‘‘protect staff and councillors’ arses and do deals behind closed doors’’.

Nowadays a familiar figure in the Marlborough firmament, she and Brown run Kippilaw House and do what they can to infuse their community with good food, whether it’s through farmers market stalls or holding classes – some for women ‘‘who have had cooking classes all over the world’’ and others for ‘‘older, single, live alone men’’.

Within its 400-odd pages,The Real McHugh is prodigiously stocked with recipes and not short of attitude when it comes to topics like the failings of supermarkets and the ‘‘nonsense’’ of bestby dates.

Copies are available through McHugh’s Gourmet Deli business in Picton and in Southland will be sold – once they’re unloaded on to our shores – at Windsor Stationery and Lotto.

She will also be travelling this month on speaking tours, combining promotion, serving ‘‘gin, juice and gems’’ as charity fundraisers.

She’ll be at the Winton Garden Bar on December 14, Otatara Golf Club on December 15, and Arrowtown Lodge December 16.