Myrtle Allen
Queen of Irish cuisine 1924 - 2018
THE doyenne of Irish cuisine and Ballymaloe matriarch Myrtle Allen has been remembered as a humble pioneer of Irish cooking who was ahead of her time.
Ms Allen passed away in the early hours yesterday just days after being admitted to Cork University Hospital with an infection.
The 94-year-old is widely credited with fostering a worldwide appreciation for Irish food, something she started doing at a time in the 1960s and 1970s when only France and Italy were seen as the homes of good cusine.
Together with her husband Ivan Allen, she opened the now-famous Yeats Room Restaurant in 1964 at Ballymaloe House in Shanagarry, Co. Cork, to the public, and held a Michelin star from 1975 to 1980.
Ballymaloe later opened as a guesthouse. The author of several cookbooks and cookery columns, she also took over an ailing restaurant in Paris in the 1980s and ran it as La Ferme Irlandaise.
Her daughter-in-law Darina and granddaughter-in-law Rachel have also made names for themselves in the culinary world.
Both are heavily involved in the now world-famous Ballymaloe Cookery School, which Darina helped found in 1983.
Last night, Darina paid an emotional tribute to her motherin-law. ‘You never know the thing that is going to change the course of your life,’ she said.
‘For me, it was meeting Myrtle and working for her from the late 1960s straight from hotel school.’
Praising the deceased’s humble attitude, she added: ‘There was none of that yelling or anything like that going on in her kitchen.’
Chef Derry Clarke, of l’Ecrivain restaurant in Dublin, described Myrtle as the ‘mother of Irish cooking’.
‘Mother of Irish cookery’