The Ballymaloe Revolution

Wayfaring Women tour group in front of Ballymaloe House, Sept. 2013

When I tell people in the U.S. that I miss Irish cooking, I always get a laugh. And when I visit friends in Ireland, they're always trying to steer me to Thai restaurants and tapas bars or make home-cooked meals for me featuring curry or pasta or tortillas or some such imported specialty. No matter how much I tell them I'm excited to be back in the country, where I can have the traditional Irish foods I've been missing, they don't seem convinced. Irish cooking has had a poor reputation around the globe for too long a time I suppose, and maybe even many locals still figure that the fight to prove otherwise is a lost cause. 

But Irish cooking is far from a lost cause. In fact it's a winning one. Any regular visitor to the country over the last two or three decades, like me, can tell you so. Likewise with anyone who's ever visited Ballymaloe in Shanagarry, County Cork. There are two Ballymaloes, and here I mean both of them--Ballymaloe House, the country home and restaurant first opened to the public in 1964 by Myrtle and Ivan Allen, and Ballymaloe Cookery School, begun in 1983 by the Allens' daughter-in-law Darina Allen and her brother Rory O'Connell.

Debbie Shaw teaches a baking course at Ballymaloe Cookery School. Check out the assortment of baked goodies: soda bread, scones, focaccia, lemon poppyseed cupcakes, and sponge cake with lemon curd and raspberry filling.

View of the front grounds from one of the guest rooms at Ballymaloe House.

Clearly, Ballymaloe is a family affair. It's also an empire largely powered by women, from Myrtle to Darina to Rachel Allen, Darina's daughter-in-law and the latest cookery celebrity to emerge from Ballymaloe. The influence these three women have had and continue to have on modern Irish cooking cannot be overstated. Their lifework is a large part of the reason for the turnaround in Irish cooking's reputation in recent years. A recent television special in Ireland on Myrtle Allen clarified as much. Long before the establishment of the Slow Food Movement or farmers' markets in Ireland, Myrtle practiced and championed an approach to cooking that would form the basis for slow food methods. Meanwhile, it was Darina Allen who spearheaded the Slow Food Movement and the founding of farmers' markets in Ireland. In more recent years, Rachel Allen has become the new face of Ballymaloe, a popular and ubiquitous host of Irish cooking programs and author of Irish cookbooks and food columns.

The Ballymaloe recipe for good food and good cooking is really simple and straightforward. Use fresh, locally sourced ingredients. Make meals from scratch as much as possible. Grow your own. And if you can't, then buy from local and ethical suppliers--local fishermen, farmers, bakers, gardeners, butchers, cheese makers, brewers...you get the drift. Reclaim some of the skills your country grandmother may have lived by, such as making your own butter or jam or baking your own bread or raising your own hens or pigs or cows...or simply growing your own herbs on the window ledge of your city apartment.

Pumpkin patch outside the glass house at Ballymaloe Cookery School

Cabbages and flowers growing at Ballymaloe Cookery School

Tomatoes grow on vines in the glass house at Ballymaloe Cookery School. The school grows and raises all the ingredients used in its cookery courses and served in its cafe.

Ballymaloe even raises its own animals on a farm on the school grounds.

Of course, not everyone has a country grandmother to learn from. And for a long time in the 20th century in Ireland (and going into the 21st), country ways were viewed by many as a way of life to abandon and even be ashamed of. Rural life in Ireland was often stereotyped as backwards and associated with poverty and oppression. Even when romanticized, there was still a stigma of poverty attached to country life and a sense that any attempts to reclaim or revive the culture of the countryside were probably a lost cause. In terms of the role of food and cooking in rural Irish life, it must be remembered that one of the most significant events in Ireland's long history was a series of potato crop failures that spiraled into the Famine of the mid-19th century. The Famine caused at least a million deaths in Ireland and drove another 2 million Irish out of the country to North America, Britain, the European Continent, Australia, and beyond in the late 1840s alone. The great majority of these people who died or emigrated during the Famine were country people, the rural Irish, the life blood of traditional Gaelic culture and Gaelic ways. At the same time as this massive hemorrhage of life throughout the Irish countryside, large volumes of food were inexplicably and unconscionably being exported from Ireland to Great Britain for commerce. Rural Ireland never really recovered from this horrific time, not even to this day, certainly not population-wise. Since the 1840s, emigration has been the one tradition of country life in Ireland that has never disappeared, never needed reviving.

I include this little history lesson because I think you can't fully understand how revolutionary the Ballymaloe approach to Irish cooking and food was until you understand the against-all-odds experience of the rural Irish and the difficulties in presenting Irish country skills in a positive light, much less in reviving them. At the time Ballymaloe House first opened to the public in the 1960s, the culture to emulate in the hospitality industry was French, not Irish. You wanted to learn how to cook or just to eat well, you went to France--not to an isolated farm and old home in a tiny village like Shanagarry in County Cork. The idea that the best in food and hospitality could come from an Irish housewife using locally grown, raised, and made ingredients (rather than importing products from France or Britain or from anywhere outside Ireland) would have been laughable to many self-proclaimed foodies back in the 60s and 70s. What did the Irish know about cooking? What did an Irish housewife know about hospitality?

Inside one of the lovely guest rooms at Ballymaloe House

The Top Room at Ballymaloe House

Quite a bit as it turned out. The Irish have long been known for their hospitality--it's been a vital practice in Irish culture going back to pre-Christian times. Meanwhile, Myrtle Allen had the sense to simply work with what she had and what she knew to make good meals first and a comfortable home away from home later for guests at Ballymaloe.

Today, Ballymaloe is internationally renowned as one of the best guesthouses and finest cooking schools in Europe. It has produced some of Ireland's best chefs and cooks, who in turn have gone on to change the nature and reputation of Irish cooking throughout Ireland and beyond for the better. Guests come to Ballymaloe House for a country Irish experience that is both luxurious and genuinely friendly, and students come to Ballymaloe Cookery School to master everything from how to make sushi to how to make a loaf of classic Irish soda bread. At the house, guests stay and eat in the same rooms where Myrtle raised her family; at the school, students learn to forage food from the same surrounding countryside where Myrtle gathered ingredients for her home-cooked meals. Beyond the house are acres of fields and grounds that include a tennis court, swimming pool, croquet set, and wooded walkways. Beyond the school are formal gardens, a glasshouse where vegetables are grown, a Celtic maze, a giant chess set, and an amazing little house with an interior made entirely of shells.

The Herb Garden at Ballymaloe Cookery School

Looking down path through the Herbaceous Border to the Shell House at Ballymaloe

The Herbaceous Border garden at Ballymaloe Cookery School

Inside the Shell House

Detail of shell work inside the Shell House

I had the privilege of staying at Ballymaloe House and taking an afternoon baking course with a tour of the grounds at Ballymaloe Cookery School this fall with a group for my tour company, Wayfaring Women Tours. For many women on the tour, Ballymaloe was their favorite experience of their time in Ireland. We were treated well at both the house and the school and had a great time in our course and enjoyed a delicious dinner. We learned how to make savory scones and Irish brown bread, with insider tips on "letting the fairies out" and "using the claw." We drank refreshing elderflower cordial and decorated cupcakes in Cork colors (in honor of our wonderful Cobh-born-and-bred tour driver, John) and made lemon curd (which was also turned over to John in gratitude). In our guest rooms we found everyone had her own fluffy white robe, glass bottles of Ballymaloe spring water, and little gifts of Ballymaloe relish and Voya bath products.

Our savory scone creations at Ballymaloe

More of our Ballymaloe masterpieces: pizza bread made from a basic soda bread base, lemon curd, and a sponge cake with strawberries and cream

The bright and colorful cafe and course room in Ballymaloe Cookery School

When I started my tour of Ireland, some of my group remained convinced that Irish cooking was all about overboiled vegetables. They didn't think they came to Ireland for the cooking. By the tour's end, I think I managed to change their minds. Or more accurately, I think Ballymaloe changed their minds. Ballymaloe and the three mighty Irishwomen who've steered it to such success: the Allen women, Myrtle, Darina, and Rachel.