The Family Behind Ireland’s Artisanal-Food Renaissance

Myrtle Allen, the 91-year-old matriarch behind Ballymaloe House—a restaurant, inn and cookery school founded in 1964—has transformed ‘fine Irish cuisine’ from a punch line into a bona fide culinary movement

By David Prior in the Wall Street Journal Magazine

DESPITE RAIN falling in buckets on the Irish countryside for the better part of a week and a howling wind from the Celtic Sea littering debris on County Cork’s winding roads, the dining room at Ballymaloe House is full. Tonight, as on most nights, matriarch Myrtle Allen welcomes guests and presides over the kitchen. At first glance, the buffet at this Sunday feast seems laden with nostalgia—lobster vol-au-vents, boiled eggs piped with mayonnaise and flowery garnishes abound. But at its core, the generous spread represents a new confidence in the quality of Irish produce: salads of just-foraged pennywort, wild garlic flowers and watercress sit alongside platters of tiny Dublin Bay prawns, cockles, sea urchins and periwinkles. House-baked soda breads accompany hand-churned butter from Jersey cows. Whole sides of smoked fish, pâtés and charcuterie are followed by a proud row of roasted birds and rare beef. Farmhouse cheeses of various sizes, shapes and aromas round out the offering. Nearly everything is organic, handmade and locally sourced. There isn’t a boiled potato in sight.

The meal is in many ways symbolic of the life’s work of the 91-year-old housewife-turned-chef and the revolution she and her family have unleashed. It represents an Irish food renaissance, the rehabilitation of a once-maligned culinary tradition and the establishment of a flourishing artisanal food culture.

Considering Ireland’s somewhat traumatic history with food—and its inferiority complex, from a centuries-long status as “England’s larder”—the shift is seismic. But it hasn’t been followed by a constellation of Michelin stars or led by a crew of swaggering young male celebrity chefs. Instead, artisanal producers and farmers have quietly pioneered this new wave, dramatically altering the perception of Irish food at home and abroad. As the country’s most authoritative food writer, John McKenna, states, “There is nothing else about Ireland in the past 25 years that you can say has had the steady, consistent and positive growth that the quality-food sector has had, and it really began with Ballymaloe.”

As Ballymaloe’s creation myth goes, Myrtle Allen, a mother of six, and her Quaker farmer husband, Ivan (now deceased), opened their dining room to the public in 1964. For a housewife and country cook, Allen says, “Serving guests simple Irish food made with our farm’s produce in my home seemed logical,” but at the time it was radical. In an era when Irish cuisine was considered at best a synonym for bland and at worst an oxymoron, Allen’s kitchen smashed stereotypes. To source the finest ingredients, she sought out farmers, fishermen and foragers, many of whom were being squeezed by an industrial food complex (and, later, overbearing European Union regulations). By conferring a new sense of dignity on local producers and elevating country cooking, Ballymaloe House followed a trajectory similar to that of California’s Chez Panisse, both in its amateurish beginnings and in its eventual status as a wellspring of the country’s new food culture. Alice Waters, the founder of Chez Panisse and a longtime friend of the Allens’s, says that Myrtle “was always decades in front of her time. She and her entire family are the change they want to see in the world.”

“There are only a couple of accountants,” notes Hazel Allen, Myrtle’s daughter-in-law, with a laugh, as she looks over the sprawling Allen family tree (branches are marked with the business each member is engaged in). From Myrtle’s original dining room, in typical Irish fashion, the family enterprise has expanded as the family has grown. The first evolution began when two young Dublin hospitality school graduates, Darina O’Connell and Hazel Lalor, found themselves at Allen’s kitchen door in the late ’60s. Darina was hired and apprenticed to Myrtle in the kitchen and subsequently married her son Tim. Hazel worked on the dining room floor and in the growing hotel business and then married another son, Rory.

Decades later, the women hold key roles at Ballymaloe. Hazel oversees the House, the now-famous restaurant and its 36 old-world-style bedrooms, often working behind the scenes. Darina, the co-owner and “headmistress” of the Ballymaloe Cookery School, has a considerably higher profile; a prolific author and relentless food activist, she’s now Ireland’s most famous cook. Brand Ballymaloe extends well beyond the House and the Cookery School, with the next generation of Allens running farmers’ markets, opening restaurants and organizing festivals.

Two years ago, the entire clan banded together to throw the inaugural Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food & Wine. The idea to launch a festival was initially greeted with skepticism. How could it be successful when the Celtic Tiger had retreated so spectacularly? After the financial crash in 2008, the country’s banking system was in ruins. In the years that followed, with unemployment reaching 15 percent, nearly 300,000 young Irish (from a population of 4.5 million) went abroad to find work. “There was a feeling that the bad old days were back again,” says Darina Allen, alluding to Ireland’s historic status as Western Europe’s poor cousin. “We had taken such a beating, everyone was afraid to take a risk and back Ireland again. For the first literary festival we weren’t sure if anyone would come at all.”

Nevertheless, the Allens persisted, opening up their address book and inviting “a never-before-assembled group of legendary food writers,” according to Darina’s brother Rory O’Connell, who helps run the festival—including the Mediterranean-food expert Claudia Roden, Indian-cuisine specialist Madhur Jaffrey and Australian cooking matriarch Stephanie Alexander. Set amid a working farm rather than in a convention center, the festival provided an intimate counterpoint to the often overblown international food festival circuit. Last year, over a weekend in May that more closely resembled a jovial Irish barn dance than an earnest platform for evangelizing or chef idolatry, the second edition saw culinary luminaries mixing easily with spectators, local farmers and artisans. René Redzepi spoke amusingly about Noma’s re-ascendency to the top spot on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Yotam Ottolenghi demonstrated dishes from his all-conquering cookbook, Plenty, while the legendary 91-year-old doyenne of Mexican food, Diana Kennedy, traded kitchen war stories with Myrtle.

‘Myrtle Allen was always decades in front of her time. She and her family are the change they want to see in the world.’

—Alice Waters

Today, the Allens’ influence is felt well beyond the hedgerows of Ballymaloe. Myrtle Allen was instrumental in giving her local suppliers the courage to believe in the richness of Irish soil, the fruits of its sea and, crucially, the quality of its dairy. Veronica Steele, the founder of Milleens Cheese, is often credited as being the mother of Irish farmhouse cheese. In 1976, she began experimenting with the excess milk from her one-horned cow, Brisket—for no other reason than that she “couldn’t bear to pour it down the drain.” Despite Ireland’s long history of dairying, no one was producing the kind of farmhouse cheese found all over France. Instead, Irish milk was diverted to make industrial cheddar for the English market. Learning from books and experimenting in her kitchen, Steele began to develop Milleens, a soft washed-rind cheese. When Myrtle sampled the results, she promptly put it on the menu at Ballymaloe and insisted from then on that only Irish cheese be served. That was the moment Steele realized the potential of farmhouse cheese. “I started inviting local dairymen’s wives eager to learn how to make cheese to come and learn from me in my kitchen,” she recalls.

Those messy tutorials on Steele’s farm resulted in a series of pupils who went on to create distinctive cheeses reflecting Irish terroir. Local producers campaigned against raw-milk restrictions, and in a relatively short time cheeses with glorious Irish names—Ardrahan, Durrus, Killeen—became prized internationally. When Veronica retired from cheese making, her son, Quinlan, a former journalist in Dublin, stepped in. He now finds himself happily immersed in curds and whey with an increasingly successful business. “Demand for Irish cheese is high. We’ve increased production 25 percent year on year for the past five years,” he says.

Quinlan is not the only scion to take up the family business. “Until recently, the next generation wanted nothing to do with going back to the farm,” says Giana Ferguson of Gubbeen Farm. “Among children of artisans, that has changed. Young Irish artisans are educated; they’ve made a choice to do this work and are rightly proud of it.”

Though the artisan renaissance began with cheese, its success has prompted many others to join Ireland’s growing quality-food sector. In Cork alone, 70 local producers now supply Ballymaloe, a number that continues to rise as new product opportunities are explored across the small country. When a local fish smoker settled a debt to Sally Barnes’s fisherman ex-husband, she found herself the owner of his smoking equipment. The self-taught Barnes now produces smoked salmon and kippers, the latter featured on the breakfast menu at Ballymaloe and stocked by several prestigious food emporiums in London. Likewise, Cam Wallace and Scott Baigent of Eight Degrees Brewing are emblematic of a craft brewing and distilling industry that has sprung up across the country since the recession.

More unusual endeavors have also found a foothold. Fingal Ferguson, of Gubbeen, produces an “Irish chorizo” from pigs fed with the discarded whey of his parents’ cheese production. Perhaps the most striking new offering is from Toby Simmonds, of Toons Bridge Dairy: buffalo mozzarella, a notoriously mercurial cheese difficult to produce outside of its native Italy. Simmonds suspected that the fickle animals might adapt well to lush Irish pastures; after a few failed attempts, his hunch proved correct. Now it’s possible to find majestic buffalo grazing alongside gentle, stout Jersey cows. “The buffalo are suited to Ireland,” Simmonds says. “They like it here. Maybe even more than Italy!”

DRIVING along the main road from the Cookery School, one passes a stark reminder of the hard life beyond Ballymaloe’s heirloom apple orchard: a large—and largely abandoned—housing development. It’s a familiar sight across the country, evidence of Ireland’s economic collapse. A collective madness to secure property at grossly inflated prices has seen many Irish homeowners defaulting or carrying mortgages higher than their property values. In 2008, the government introduced a punishing austerity regime that has brought only a partial recovery of the country’s fortunes. The Irish, often suspicious of government, the financial sector and outside corporations, have largely returned to their historically frugal ways. Tuition for Darina Allen’s three-month course at the Cookery School is not insignificant—more than $12,500—and when the financial crisis hit, the Allens feared that business would be seriously hurt.

Demand not only held, but in recent years many students have decided to apply their redundancy packages to invest in careers in food. “I think as a country we lost our way for some years there,” Darina says. “We forgot about what was important: a real economy, a tangible economy, one that makes things and that looks after one another.” The artisanal food movement has been supported by the Irish government, with efforts to position it as “clean and green” and offer tax credits to fledgling small-scale producers. Apart from shorter courses, ranging from a lesson in Irish bread baking to foraging expeditions, the core of Ballymaloe’s Cookery School is its 12-week certificate course. Designed to prepare professionals for a career in the food industry, the program has produced a steady stream of successful alumni. Acclaimed London restaurants—such as Skye Gyngell’s Spring, Jeremy Lee’s Quo Vadis and Ruth Rogers’s River Café—routinely hire graduates. Many have gone on to become chefs and owners of small food enterprises around the country, as well as part of a new generation of food writers and media personalities. Darina’s own daughter-in-law, the telegenic Rachel Allen, has established herself as a celebrity chef, ensuring that the Allen name remains relevant to aspiring cooks across the British Isles.

This May, the third edition of the Ballymaloe Festival (now sponsored by Kerrygold Irish butter) will take place on the bucolic grounds of the House and its Cookery School. Building on the success of the previous two editions, this year’s lineup of speakers includes Alice Waters, the New York restaurateur April Bloomfield, Chinese-food authority Fuchsia Dunlop and the influential wine commentator Jancis Robinson, among many local heroes of the Irish food scene. “We want to continue to celebrate the great cooking teachers and food writers, individuals who gently guide home cooks every day through their words and wisdom,” says Rory O’Connell.

Many attendees at this year’s festival will leave with a changed view not only of Irish food, but of Ireland as a whole. “What I took back from Ballymaloe was a great surprise,” reflects René Redzepi. “After hearing so many people talk about a country in real trouble, about empty restaurants and unbooked hotel rooms, this was in stark contrast to the Allens. They are keeping full houses and organizing festivals. It is a testament to hard work, and to planting seeds that are meant to grow slowly into big strong trees.”