‘‘When you grow a vegetable yourself, you’re less likely to
boil it to death.’’


In 1968, a young woman from the Irish Midlands went to work at a peculiar new restaurant on the southern coast of County Cork.

“I had heard that there was a farmer’s wife running a restaurant in her house, serving Irish food and writing the menu every day depending on what was in the garden,” said the woman, Darina O’Connell Allen. “You can’t imagine how revolutionary all of that was at the time.”

Along with other young women of her generation ? the California restaurateur Alice Waters, the cookbook authors Paula Wolfert and Diana Kennedy ? she was about to pursue radical culinary goals: to break the stranglehold of French haute cuisine in the English-speaking world; to cook seasonal food, grown sustainably; to cook with respect for traditional home cooks and simple, excellent dishes.

“It had to happen, the return to cooking,” said Myrtle Allen, the “farmer’s wife” who took on Ms. Allen at Ballymaloe House and later became her mother-in-law. “People don’t just throw away an entire food culture after centuries.”

But they came pretty close.

At the time, Irish cooking, even in Ireland, was almost a joke. (The Irish actor Peter O’Toole once said that his three favorite Irish foods were all Guinness.) Few Irish towns had more than a chip shop and a pub, the (very few) white-tablecloth restaurants were French, and virtually all the chefs were men.

Darina Allen had just graduated from hotel school in Dublin, and along with the few other women in her class was being firmly nudged toward a management job. “But I didn’t want to wear a suit,” she said. “I wanted to be in the kitchen.”

And so she was, and remains. Now, 42 years later, she is the founder and chief instructor at Ballymaloe Cookery School in Shanagarry, manager of its organic farm, author of 16 cookbooks and director of Slow Food Ireland.

She is also the mentor to thousands of ex-students who have fanned out across the globe, carrying her message of simple cooking integrated with gardening, preserving, foraging and animal husbandry.

Her latest cookbook, “Forgotten Skills of Cooking,” is an outgrowth of the school’s popular “Forgotten Skills” workshops, which teach the basics of making butter, curing bacon and skinning animals.

Ms. Allen, now 61, teaches most of the professional classes and many of the amateur ones, and students say she is a constant and informative presence.

“I remember having to nudge chickens and geese out of the way on the way to class,” said Bing Broderick, a 2004 alumnus of Ballymaloe’s 12-week professional training course. He now runs the Haley House Bakery Cafe, a nonprofit restaurant in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

On the first day of class, he said, each student begins by sowing seeds that produce lettuces, radishes or herbs before the course is over.

“When you grow a vegetable yourself, you’re less likely to boil it to death,” Ms. Allen said.

Irish food has often been misunderstood, reduced to caricatures of corned beef and cabbage and Irish stew. No one has done more to counter that than Ms. Allen and her mentor, Myrtle.

Myrtle Allen opened the restaurant at Ballymaloe House in 1964, in an effort to maintain the vast, dilapidated manor that came with the farm she and her husband bought in 1948. She served the same food she made for her family, like brown bread, smoked eel, beef with horseradish sauce, turnips from the garden and apple cake made with the farm’s bright yellow butter.

Darina wrote to Myrtle applying for a position as a “lady cook,” as she had been advised by her instructors, so that she wouldn’t be assigned scut work. “We didn’t want a lady, but we hired her anyway,” Myrtle Allen said.

By studying cookbooks, the two women learned the basics of French cuisine, layered them with home-grown ingredients and made Ballymaloe House an international food destination.

“Using elements of native cuisine in a white-tablecloth setting was totally new in Ireland at the time,” said Colman Andrews, the author of “The Country Cooking of Ireland.” “The Irish, for many complicated reasons, were not used to being proud of their food.”


By JULIA MOSKIN