Myrtle Allen

A giant of food remembered

Back in 2013, just in advance of her 90th birthday, I interviewed Myrtle Allen for The Irish Daily Mail. She died in 2018.

Myrtle Allen, chatelaine of Ballymaloe House, doyenne of Irish food and internationally famous amongst chefs, hoteliers and people who like to eat well, will be 90 next birthday.

She is, she tells me, over tea accompanied by scones with gooseberry and ginger jam, “supposed to be retired” but I get the impression that retirement is an alien concept to her. She admits to taking a little time out, occasionally, to relax. “Yesterday, for example,” she says, “I spent ten minutes picking the first of the blackberries. But I suppose that was about food too…”

Myrtle Allen is the subject of a documentary to be broadcast next week on RTE television. Her admirers have long clamoured for such a tribute but she is as modest and retiring as he is celebrated. Getting her to agree to be interviewed must have been quite a challenge to David Hare, the film-maker who has put together this biographical portrait.

She kindly agrees to meet me – I have known her and Ballymaloe for many years – but her daugher-in-law, Hazel Allen, says to me beforehand “I don’t know how much you will get out of her. Just let her talk, if she will.” Myrtle Allen is a woman of few, but carefully chosen, words.

She came to East Cork as a very young bride during the War and settled down to being a farmer’s wife in the lush countryside of Shangarry, not far from the market town of Midleton. In the early ‘sixties, having moved to nearby Ballymaloe. she started to advertise “dinner in a country house” and the rest, to use the old cliché, is history. Ballymaloe House (and Ballymaloe Cookery school, founded and run by her son and daughter-in-law, Darina) are now world famous.

When Nicholas Lander, restaurant critic of the Financial Times, chose a handful of restaurants around the world to profile in his recent book The Art of The Restaurateur, Ballymaloe instantly made the cut.

Myrtle Allen was born in Tivoli on the northside of Cork city and raised in Monkstown, near the harbour, the daughter of an architect. “My mother was quite poorly when we were children and she believed, quite rightly, that good food is essential for health. We had a big garden, and a great deal of what we ate was grown there,” she says. “I grew up knowing that lots of fresh produce is what you need.”