GREEN THINKING:EVERY SUNDAY EVENING, Myrtle Allen's myriad family members sit down around an enormous table in Ballymaloe House and have dinner together. It's not always the full quotient, but generally whoever is around makes an appearance, with one of her daughters pouring wine, a son carving the meat, a son-in-law clearing plates, and maybe a grandchild or two serving the desserts. It's like a who's who of Ballymaloe, with only the matriarch herself missing, writes FIONA MCCANN
Until in bustles her heir apparent, Darina Allen, and it’s as if the sun around which the family orbits has finally risen. She whirls through the house and restaurant, correcting, cajoling, organising and delegating, and even when she finally takes her place at the table she’s the one whose booming voice resonates along its length, guiding the conversation, filling the gaps, keeping all involved engaged and entertained, as she flaps around the assembled brood.
These days, Darina Allen is matriarch-in-chief, as well as a chef, teacher, entrepreneur, author of 15 cookery books and the head of Slow Food Ireland. But as she herself admits, Ballymaloe and all it encompasses is still a family project. “There are four generations of the Allen family living within a very short distance of each other here, and we all have different businesses within the Ballymaloe umbrella. We’re all financially independent from each other, yet we all support each other, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t slight differences of opinion about how to do things from time to time, but that’s how it is.”
Daughter-in-law Rachel is of course a household name as a TV chef, as well as creating her own succession of cookery books and accessories, but there’s also Rory, who owns and runs the farm on the Ballymaloe House estate and hosts musical evenings at the house, and his wife Hazel, who manages the hotel with her daughter Róisín. Their son Cullen Allen’s company, Cully Sully, makes ready meals, soups and pies, and their son-in-law, Ted Berner, married to Róisín, is a talented cook and the man behind Wildside Catering which specialises in pig roasts.
Myrtle’s daughter Wendy is also involved in the Ballymaloe enterprise, Darina’s brother Rory O’Connell helped found the cookery school and currently teaches classes there, while several other scions of the family boast farming and cooking-related enterprises. And that’s just for starters: there are other grandchildren also earning their stripes on the farm or at the school, and finding ways to put their individual talents to work for the Ballymaloe brand.
It seems that the family that dines together – and in this case works together – stays together. “Oh my God, we are so fortunate,” says Darina when I finally get her to sit down the next day in her renowned cooking school in Shanagarry, a thriving enterprise located on its own 100-acre farm that came from modest beginnings to put Ireland on the international culinary map. “Our four children and our six grandchildren live within 15 minutes of us. How lucky are we?”
It wasn't all plain sailing, however: the Allens have weathered their storms. In 2003, Tim Allen pleaded guilty to possessing pornographic images of children and was sentenced to 240 hours of community service and fined. But the family endured, and Darina managed not only to keep her side of the business intact, but continues to expand it, while in the meanwhile adding another book to her impressive collection. This latest is a hefty tome, entitled Forgotten Skills of Cooking, and in a way it embodies the Ballymaloe ethos, pointing to the need for one generation to pass its acumen to the next to ensure its survival.
“I feel really strongly about the importance of cooking with the grandchildren, and passing on skills,” says the woman who has also been instrumental in establishing a Grandmother’s Day in Ireland so that others might do the same. “It’s a simple idea, the notion of sharing basic skills and traditions, without it being a big deal. But the value of these skills - and the communication between generations - can’t be underestimated.’’
It’s not the only thing that is galvanising this unstoppable woman: she’s also convinced that although these skills have been devalued over the years, they are just the kind of thing to see people through a recession. “So many people in the past 20 years, they all concentrated on academic careers, and the whole subliminal message coming from our parents, and indeed from the career guidance people, was: ‘Why would you bother learning how to cook?’” As she says this, students from her 12-week course scurry by with pots and pans, and a group of secondary-school students arrives for a tour of the school and farm. “It was a terrible disservice to all of the young people, because so many young people, and even not so young, are in a totally changed situation, and are totally traumatised, having been riding on the crest of a wave, so in control, and suddenly they realise their set of skills are no longer any good to them in a changed environment.”
She takes a breath, every inch the angry schoolmistress. "That's one of the reasons why I wrote this Forgotten Skillsbook. It's the whole underlying thing. Let's not ever let our young people away without equipping them with the skills for life."
She looks set to leap off the seat. There she is, 61 years old and a grandmother to six, with more apparent energy than the whole herd of lethargic school kids wandering around the gardens. It’s not just her own family who she is concerned about – it’s everybody’s family, a generation of people who have missed out on some essential life lessons, including some of her own students. To illustrate her point, she recalls one day wandering through the kitchens of her school and catching one student on the cusp of throwing out some cream she had overwhipped. “She’d actually made butter, and she’d no idea she’d made butter and was just about to throw it into the bin,” says Darina, her eyes wide at the thought. “Then I realised that other students in the kitchen, at least half the students, had never thought that butter came from cream, and had no idea that it was as easy as that to make butter.”
Darina Allen has been filling these gaps in knowledge for a while now, providing courses not just in cooking, but in all manner of what she calls “forgotten skills”, including vegetable-growing, bee-keeping, pig-curing, keeping chickens, and smoking your own food. “They started off quite slowly but they really have been gathering momentum.”
Students mill around and prepare for the afternoon’s demonstration, which is to include an introduction to a local bee-keeper and a talk from a hunter about how to prepare game. “Now it’s just going through the roof.”
Ballymaloe has clearly tapped into an increasing interest in self-sufficiency, as well as a growing awareness about what we eat and where it comes from. “We’ve handed over the power over our food and everything else to the multinationals, basically, and we can take back a bit of the control ourselves,” says Darina, encouraging everyone to grow whatever they can for their own consumption. It’s not just about making your own food, however, but also about making your own decisions. “People are no longer able to judge by smell and by looking at something whether it’s safe to eat or not,” she says, aghast. “The only thing that they judge by is best-before or sell-by dates. So over 30 per cent of the food that’s bought in Ireland is thrown in the bin . . . and this is disempowering people without them realising.”
This, according to Darina, is just what the profiteers are after. “That plays right into the hands of the food manufacturers, because more and more food is bought.”
We’re not the only ones getting it wrong, however: it may or may not comfort readers to hear that even the professionals are ignorant. “If I had my way, no cook or chef would be allowed into a restaurant kitchen to cook until they’d spent a year on a farm or in gardens, growing things themselves and producing it,” she says. “Then I could tell you they wouldn’t thump their fists on the table saying ‘I want it and I want it now!’ Because a lot of them don’t even know what’s in season.”
There are more than economic reasons, however, to grow your own food, especially if, like Darina, you believe that food has its medicinal properties, curing ailments and fortifying against illness. “The other very important thing about growing things yourself is that there is an absolutely alarming decrease of vitamins and minerals and trace elements in a lot of the food that we’re eating,” she says. “It’s really scary how diminished the nutritive value of the food has become as we mass produce with very intensive farming.” Food might be medicine, if Darina is to be believed, yet what of those for whom food is the very cause of their illness? “There’s a growing problem with food intolerances and food allergies, and it’s all connected to the way our food is being produced, and the kind of food we’re eating,” says Darina. “Years ago, when I was a child, the majority of the food we ate was local . . . food from our own garden, from the neighbours. We were reared on warm milk from the local dairy farmer. So in all of that food, you’re getting your local antibodies. It builds up your resistance to disease. Nowadays, people are eating virtually no food that contains the antibodies of their area. So I keep wondering is there a connection between that and the growing number of food allergies and food intolerances. Because a lot of the food we’re eating is coming from the other side of the world. It’s a whole different set of bacteria and enzymes and so on that our systems are genetically conditioned to absorb.”
It may be just a theory, and Darina’s theories have not always been popular – she has been dismissing diet foods for years, even when they were very much in vogue – but more and more people are sourcing local produce, and foraging, something Darina has been doing since she was a little girl. “As Myrtle always says, if you’re here long enough, people are bound to come round to your way of thinking.”
She laughs, her face still remarkably unlined, and bounces up for a coffee refill in her red Converse trainers. She outlines her dream of getting the Education, Health and Agriculture departments to work in tandem on the issue of food. If people make educated choices about what goes into their bodies, this, Darina believes, will bring the bill down for the Department of Health. The only downside to her theorising is the cost: “We’re simply going to have to pay a bit more for our food – that’s the reality.”
People attending her courses are already aware of that reality: the 12-week certificate courses cost €9,795. Darina makes no apologies. “A lot of people look at the prices and think ‘Oh my God, it’s so expensive’, and it is expensive, but it’s expensive because it has to be that price to give the quality we want to give. A lot of times people don’t charge enough to allow themselves to do a good enough job.”
Most would agree that Darina has done a good job, making a name for Irish cooking and produce abroad, even though she no longer graces our television screens with the same frequency that she once did. She has also done all of this at a time when making such progress was not so easy for a woman, particularly in an area that had been devalued, specifically because it was considered “women’s work”.
“I came out of hotel school in 1967. I was trying to get into a top restaurant in Ireland . . . and it was almost impossible for a woman to get into them. Men were chefs, women cooked in little tea shops.”
Yet in Myrtle Allen, who began the whole Ballymaloe business with a restaurant in her home on a Cork farm, she found not only a mentor, but a role model. “The Allens are a Quaker family,” explains Darina. “It’s part of the Quaker religion, that men and women are equal. This is not something they just paid lip service to.” As a result, Darina was always encouraged and supported as she came up with ideas to help save the family business, particularly at a time when, as a farming family, they were suffering badly. “I know in some families, and women have talked to me about this, if they come up with a suggestion they are immediately slapped down,” she says. “And so many women around the country are sitting there having completely underachieved just because they were not allowed to let their entrepreneurial side bubble up.”
Not so for Darina, or indeed for any of the Allen clan, who have succeeded in creating businesses and making a living within the food and farming industries. Yet the question remains, as Darina approaches retirement.
So who will take over the mantle when this boundless energy eventually runs dry? “That isn’t obvious yet, and with a business this size, it’s quite complicated,” she admits. “It may be a couple of the children. And I always think it’s quite good to have outside people as well as family to keep the whole thing professional. But it is something that we’re obviously thinking about more and more as we get a little bit older.”
It’s still hard to imagine Darina running out of steam as she leaps up to pluck at a pastry, knead some students’ dough, cover salad leaves, and sample produce. Outside, it’s a beautiful day and the schoolchildren are taking in the acre of greenhouses, the farm-raised pigs, the chicken runs and the vegetable beds. Emily Allen, Darina’s daughter, is busy at the beds, while her fiancé, Philip Dennhardt, rambles by in search of a pig for his upcoming butchery and sausage-making course.
“They all have their input into the place,” says Darina. “But what we love is for our children and our grandchildren to find a way to earn their living in a related business.” With daughter Lydia now married to an organic farmer, and Toby and his wife set to take over the running of the shop, it looks like the skills of the parents have taken root in a new generation. For those of us who haven’t grown up in Ballymaloe, well, we’ll just have to read the book.
Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Lost Art of Creating Delicious Home Produceby Darina Allen will be published by Kyle Cathie in November, £30