Making the leap from kitchen to factory

Fact File

Name: Darina Allen

Age: 50 Lives: Ballymaloe, Co Cork

Famous for: her brown bread, telly cooking and all things wholesome

In the news because: She's just leapt from the country kitchen to the supermarket with the launch of her own ice-cream, the first product from the Darina Allen Food Company

Most likely to say: Woops-a-daisy!

Least likely to say: First, take your can opener . . .

Gone are the oversized, Dennis Taylor-esque glasses, the frilly collars and country casuals. A new-look Darina Allen took to the stage this week with a fresh commercial venture to match.

Having shunned for many years the lucrative product-endorsement route taken by many celebrities (she once said it would compromise her culinary independence), Darina has finally given in to temptation with the introduction of her own range of ice-cream to the Irish market.

With a strong personality-based brand image - her own face appears on each tub - the initiative adds another boon to the already burgeoning Darina Allen cooking empire.

Her dozen cookery books have set records for their genre, outselling most of Ireland's top novelists. Simply Delicious, her first title, alone sold more than 200,000 copies and is credited with saving countless marriages through its easy-to-follow instructions for husband and wife.

Her world-famous cookery school and tourist gardens at Ballymaloe in Co Cork are four miles from the legendary Ballymaloe House of her mother-in-law, Myrtle. Now going for more than 15 years, the school attracts trainee chefs from as far afield as Japan, Italy and Australia, with a limit of 44 students, each paying £3,750 for a place on the annual course.

And now, the Darina Allen Food Company. Four flavours of ice-cream are the first products under the label, soon to be followed by other culinary delights, expected to include preservatives, sauces and gateaux.

However, if you thought this new business departure marked the end of the homely, if sometimes a little too motherly, Darina Allen that we know and love, think again.

The passion she gained as a child growing up in the rural midlands for family cooking with the freshest ingredients from outside her door hasn't waned after three decades in the business.

Despite international success, her homing instincts remain. Even the trademark nervous guffaw, which predates her first television appearance, is still there.

Born in the village of Cullahill, Co Laois, Darina was the eldest of nine children whose father died when she was 15. Her mother ran everything from the local pub to the undertaker's and instilled in her family a love of good food. At 73, she still makes brown bread each day for the pub, now run by two of Darina's brothers.

"Our mother kept telling us there was nothing we could not do. That philosophy is built into every one of us," says Blathnaid Bergin, one of Darina's sisters and a notable culinary expert in her own right.

Darina went to school to the Dominican Convent in Wicklow, graduating to St Mary's College of Catering in Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin, with a career in food or tourism already in mind.

She wrote to Myrtle Allen asking for a job and was accepted. Within a year she had settled in as the bright new thing of Ballymaloe and was engaged to her boss's eldest son, Tim. He was only 20 and she was 21 when they married.

This leads to the subject of family, which is hard to avoid when it comes to Darina Allen and Ballymaloe. The Quaker ethos which originated at Ballymaloe House under Myrtle and Ivan Allen flourishes today in the extended family business.

Of Myrtle's six children, five are involved with running the local hotel, craft shop and farm, while the sixth operates the Ballymaloe restaurant and gallery in Cork. Two of Darina's siblings are also involved: her brother, Rory, is head chef at Ballymaloe House and her sister, Elizabeth, is head gardener at the school.

Moreover, Darina's eldest son, Isaac (27), recently opened a cafe beside the school. Who knows, her other children, Toby (24), Lydia (21) and Emily (17), may yet join the business too.

Even the new venture into food production has retained the family ties. Matrix Foods, the Co Cork manufacturer of Darina Allen Food Company products, is run by a first cousin of Tim. Darina and her husband are major shareholders in the company and its sister marketing firm, Genesis Corporation.

While businesses are connected, however, family members stay financially independent. "This is crucial," says Darina, "so that others don't feel hard done by if one decides to stay in bed in the morning."

The family comes together only on rare occasions, most recently for the funeral of Ivan Allen two months ago. Darina, like the rest of her family, was devastated at his death. "She felt like she'd lost her father for the second time," said one family member.

Family recipes formed the core of Darina's many books as well as her nine TV series (a 10th is planned along with two more publications). Her approach from the outset has been meticulous, almost militaristic. Staff at RTE, where she got her big break, remember her perfectionism and intolerance of errors, but they also remember a nervousness and unease in front of the camera, which came from the same source: her fear of making a mistake.

That fear became a reality when, in a pudding recipe for her first Christmas cook book, she advised people to use 2 lb of bread crumbs instead of 7 oz. The error reportedly traumatised her for months as she dreaded the ruination of a thousand Christmas dinners.

A no-nonsense approach to cooking lies behind her success and fuels her opinions on food and the environment. Her books are littered with cries for the promotion of natural, locally produced foodstuffs and the protec tion of lakes and rivers, reflecting her membership of the boards of An Bord Iascaigh Mhara, An Bord Bia and, most recently, the Irish Food Safety Authority.

Her outspokenness has led to offers of an entry to politics, with both Fine Gael and the Green Party soliciting her candidature for both national and European elections. To date she has turned down all such offers but remains active in campaigning, most recently against the extension of genetically modified food trials to rural locations, including one on her own doorstep at Shanagarry.

A few years ago she made headlines when coming to the defence of small home-based food suppliers who were under threat of extinction from EU regulations on hygiene and labelling. "Factories simply do not produce the same quality food or maintain the same sort of social framework in a community," she wrote in a joint letter with her mother-in-law to The Irish Times.

However, this week she made that same jump from home to factory with a product targeting Ireland's £100 million ice-cream market.

The truth is Darina has just got too big for her own kitchen.