INTERVIEW: Laois born legendary Irish chef Darina Allen 'getting back to basics'

Legendary Irish television chef and co-founder of Ballymaloe Cookery School Darina Allen took time out to chat to the Leinster Express Laois Life magazine recently, about her Laois upbringing, and her busy life at 76.

“I was born in the little village of Cullohill in county Laois. I was the eldest of nine children of Elizabeth (Lily) and Dick O’Connell. 

“My father passed away when I was 14. My mother had nine of us to look after. She loved to cook. Mummy was a very good home cook. We also had a kitchen garden and our own hens. We reared chickens for the table and we had apple trees. So basically we had really good food. I just took it for granted, I thought that was what everybody was like. 

“We had a house cow, a Kerry cow, so we drank our wonderful own fresh warm milk.  So I was very fortunate to be brought up on healthy, wholesome delicious food.

“My father was a merchant, we had a grocery and pub and petrol pumps, he was an auctioneer and undertaker. He provided for all the needs of the village.

“As a child I was running in and out of the shop. I could do anything from pack up tea and sugar which came in a chest, or pulling a pint. At that stage those were the sort of things children could do. I now realise that to a certain extent, that’s where my entrepreneurial skills might have been honed. Though I didn’t of course have any idea what the word entrepreneur meant,” she said.

Three of the nine children went on to success in the world of cookery - Darina, Blathnaid and Rory, who co-founded Ballymaloe Cookery School with Darina and who also teaches and writes cookery books. 

Siblings Darina Allen and Rory O'Connell.

“Blathnaid also did hotel management and does consultancy now. She’s brilliant, we all cook, every one of us. Cooking was just going on all around us, we just learned to make bread and do all sorts of things by osmosis in a way. We all helped, we didn’t sit slumped on a sofa watching a pad, we all had jobs and were learning skills,” she said.

Darina studied hotel management in Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin.

“I’m 76 now, I was born in 1948. I went to boarding school in the Dominican Convent in Wicklow for five years. They were very visionary nuns. In the early ‘60s they were encouraging us to have a proper career, to do architecture or medicine or science or something. Many women at that stage just got married and had children. All I wanted to do was to cook or to grow because they were the only two things I knew anything about, to a certain extent.

“My family on both sides loved their gardens. I was interested in growing from a very early age. If I was going for a walk with Mummy she would be naming the plants. I knew the names of plants and flowers and weeds which I now go foraging for. 

“At that stage cooks and chefs had absolutely no status. Those kinds of jobs were looked on as very menial. Men were chefs and women just ran tea shops or something. But I persisted and the nuns said it would have to be a degree in horticulture or in hotel management. 

“I did my course but then I couldn’t get into one of the top kitchens, in Dublin or London. 

“You never know in your life what tiny thing can change the course of your life. In my case it was meeting one of the senior lecturers in the corridor one day, Mor Murnaghan from Omagh. She said to me ‘why haven’t you got a job? Everyone else from your course has.’ Like an assistant hotel manager, but I didn’t want that, I wanted to learn about fresh herbs, how to make homemade icecream. She told me I was too fussy. 

“But then she told me about this woman down in Cork who had opened a restaurant in her farmhouse, miles from the city. All this was incredulous, people didn’t open restaurants out in the country then. She told me they had a farm and a jersey herd and made icecream and a big walled garden and I just couldn’t believe my ears. That ticked all the boxes. She came back with a piece of paper and said write to that woman and the name was Myrtle Allen. “Who of course later became my mother-in-law so I became a member of the family by marrying the boss’s son,” Darina Allen said.

Darina Allen pictured with dishes for one of her renowned Simple Delicious cookbooks.

She comes back to visit her home village of Cullohill regularly, and buys local food too for Ballymaloe.

“A lot of my family is still in Laois, in Abbeyleix and Cullohill. I still have a strong connection and a great admiration for what’s happening in county Laois. 

“My brother Richard is very involved in Laois Tastes. Just this morning a whole consignment of lovely organic oats came from the Merry Mill in Vicarstown. I get my free range turkeys and chickens in Fior Bhia. You have a lovely chocolate place in Abbeyleix as well. There’s so many wonderful things.  The whole food scene has changed utterly.  I’m always on the lookout for the best artisans and farmers around the country. 

“Cullohill has changed partly because the pub is now closed,” she noted.

The Sportsman’s Inn, owned by the O’Connells since 1916 closed during Covid. It was sold to retired senior Garda couple John and Annmarie Scanlon, who recently got planning approval to extend and reopen it as a gastropub.

“We were delighted, they’re such lovely people, who have integrated into the local community. It will be marvellous to have it open again and to be a centre of life in the village”.

Asked what is her own go-to simple meal to enjoy, she said “it depends on the season”.

“At the moment I’m just enjoying the first of the rhubarb, roasting it and baking pies and things.”

Darina believes many people do not know how to cook any more.

“Everything changes, the reality is that economically, both partners have to work, so there’s less time. It’s a combination of less time, and a lot of people now no longer know how to cook. That’s terribly serious for a lot of reasons. It makes life so much easier if you can cook and rustle up a little meal for your family. 

“The other thing that’s absolutely essential, and should be a priority for the Department of Education, is to embed practical cooking in the national curriculum.To teach children not only how to cook but how to grow. 

“They’re all going to need this, with our food security problems, the future of food is local. We need to be self-sufficient as far as possible.

“I’ve written several books called Grow, Cook, Nourish, to grow at least something for themselves and at least they know it’s not sprayed. It’s such a joy to sow a seed and wait for something to grow that will be delicious to eat, and then share it with family and friends and eat it slowly. 

“It’s a necessity now. Everybody thinks there’ll be forever food on the supermarket shelves, well watch that space. It will come sooner rather than later and we need to be ready, to learn those skills and pass them onto our children. We’ve become increasingly de-skilled in the last decades because everything is super convenient.” 

She believes vegetables should be priced higher.

“The cheap food policy is an absolute disaster. Farmers and food producers, particularly vegetable growers are not being paid anything like enough, even to cover costs, to produce nourishing wholesome food. Why should the farmers have to produce food at such a low economic level? No other industry has to do that. We’re sleepwalking into a really serious crisis. One in five children are overweight, the diabetes figures are going through the roof. The wealth of a nation depends on its health, and that depends to a great extent on what we eat.

She is greatly concerned about the schoolmeals policy. 

“It was such a good, progressive idea, but unfortunately, a lot of the meals are not being eaten. Feeding is not the same as nourishing. It should be a priority to feed our children healthy wholesome food so they can concentrate and have energy. Not to give them ultra processed food that’s going to cause more health problems. That needs to go back to the drawing board. I don’t envy the department’s task. They can’t hand it over,” Darina Allen said.

Ballymaloe has been running for 40 years now and is as popular as ever.

“Most of our courses are very over subscribed. There’s 15 nationalities here today and that’s not unusual. I’m drawing back a little from the day to day running of the cookery school. But my startup project at 75 in 2023 was the Ballymaloe organic farm school. 

“That’s passing on skills of growing, farming, keeping chickens, bees, homeopathic medicine, all of that. There’s a real craving to relearn these skills. The homesteading movement around the world is a global phenomenon. People are sick and tired of the rat race. They’re buying a little land and want to take back control and be more self-sufficient but they have nowhere to find the skills. People are literally flying from America for these courses. 

Retirement is not on the menu.

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“I hope the good lord will leave me plenty of energy for quite a while yet. Retirement is not really something that I would enjoy. I don’t play golf or anything. At the moment I’m probably working as hard as ever, but hugely enjoying it,” she said.

As a successful woman in business, has she advice for others?

“Just do it. Stop procrastinating. If you have a little idea, go. If it doesn’t work, it’s not the end of the world, you’ve learned from it and can try something else. It’s much better than living all your life with ‘what if’. Learn from it and build on it. I feel so fortunate to be doing something that I really love. To have found a way of earning a living and to create employment, on the farm. “

Follow Ballymaloe Organic Farm School on Instagram. 

Find the latest edition of Laois Life magazine next to the Leinster Express on sale in Laois shops and supermarkets.