The chef and cookery school teacher admits it was never in her plan to work in the food industry until she was forced to think of a different way to make a living
Darina Allen in RSVP Magazine(Image: White Cat Studio)
Darina Allen admits she never planned to work in the food industry – and that Ballymaloe’s success was “born out of desperation” to keep a roof over her family’s head.
The much loved chef founded Ballymaloe Cookery School in 1983, after her mother-in-law Myrtle Allen created the Ballymaloe brand, which remains a firm favourite with Irish consumers today.
Darina was always a gifted cook and baker but never considered pursuing a career in food.
She told RSVP Magazine: “No, not at all. My mother was a very good cook, so I was always surrounded by food.
“Basically, I never had ambition whatsoever to be what might be perceived now as a ‘career woman’.
“I got married in 1970 and had four children with my husband. At the end of the 1970s there was a very bad recession, which meant I needed to change what I was doing.
“I was working in horticulture and several things happened such as the recession and the cost of everything shot up, kind of like now.
“The cheap food policy came in and I was getting less and less for my produce every year.
“Oil prices shot up, and I was heating greenhouses with oil. All of this happened with four children.”
Darina says the “writing was on the wall” and she had to think of a different way to make a living.
She continued: “So then, I thought about what I could do. I love to cook and realised that some things I could do quite easily, that others found difficult.
“My mother-in-law, Myrtle Allen, had been teaching classes in the winter and I thought I could teach some classes too.
“I come from a long line of mad women really, because she opened up a restaurant in Paris to showcase Irish food. People kept asking her to do classes at home but she said to me, ‘Why don’t you do them instead?’.
“I thought nobody would be interested because they wanted to be taught by her and nobody knew my name.
“The cooking school was actually born out of desperation, to keep a roof over my family’s head.
“I now feel so fortunate that I found a way to earn a living, to continue to live on the land my family and I love. I feel so blessed.”
As well as the cookery school, Darina is the founder of the Organic Farm School at Ballymaloe, and has no plans to slow down or retire.
“The word retirement has never been in my lexicon, really,” she said.
“I would just prefer to take things a little bit easier, but I’m super fortunate to have a really great and enthusiastic team at Ballymaloe who are just as passionate about passing on the skills as I am.
“I want to just keep on going. I’ve always been lucky to be a high energy person.
“Naturally, one’s energy gets a little bit less as the years go by, but overall I’ve been very fortunate.”
Darina has passed her love of food down to her grandchildren, with granddaughter Scarlett – whose mother is Rachel Allen – particularly skilled at baking.
Darina said: “Scarlett is fantastic. All she wants to do is cook, travel and teach.
“She comes in whenever she has a day off school or whatever, and she could run the bakery, she is that good.
“The grandchildren are surrounded by food, I think they just absorb it by osmosis.
“Most of them, when they finish school for summer, the first thing they do is a course so they have those skills when they travel. They can get a job anywhere in the world then.”
Although she is surrounded by food all day, Darina still finds cooking therapeutic after a long day at work.
“Oh yes, I think cooking is totally relaxing,” she said.
“I’m so lucky that food is my subject because it’s something that is part of your life every single day.
“It doesn’t matter where you travel in the world, if you can cook, you’re set. It is an easy way to make friends and influence people.
“I absolutely love cooking, and teaching people how to cook.
“I feel so fortunate that food is my subject because I could be teaching people maths, but you can’t eat a maths book [laughs].
“It’s so rewarding to have students who then go out into the world with their skills.
“You give people a gift for life when you teach them how to cook something.
“It could be something as simple as a rhubarb tart, or a soup, but it’s something that can change people’s lives.
“If you can cook, you can whip up a meal in a matter of minutes and have friends over for dinner and that’s where memories are made.”
Read the full interview with Darina in this month’s issue of RSVP Magazine, on shelves nationwide now.
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