Myrtle Allen
Chatelaine of Ballymaloe House, Co Cork, who transformed the reputation of Irish cuisine
MYRTLE ALLEN, who has died aged 94, was credited with transforming Irish cuisine from being a synonym for grey meat and soggy vegetables; as chatelaine of the Michelin-starred Ballymaloe House restaurant in Co Cork, her name became a byword for high quality country house cuisine using the best local and seasonal ingredients.
She was born Myrtle Hill on March 13 1924 into a Protestant middle-class family and brought up at St Aubyn’s, Monkstown, about 10 miles from Cork city, in a Victorian house with five acres overlooking the harbour. Her father, Henry Hill, was a third generation architect eulogised in an obituary in the Irish Builder in 1951 as “perhaps the most distinguished of a family group of architects who combined technical integrity and infallible artistic taste with debonair grace in social relationships”.
Her mother, Elsie, née Stoker, suffered from ill health, and Myrtle and her older sister Moira were brought up to believe in the health-giving properties of fresh produce.
“We had our own vegetables and fruit, fresh from the garden,” Myrtle recalled in an interview with the Sunday Times in 2009. “[Our mother] was anxious that we had a lot of milk and brown bread, everything that people are saying now is good for you, as if it were new.” In summer, “an old lady, Mrs O’flaherty, would knock on the door with a basket full of shrimps that had been caught in the harbour … They also caught salmon just below the house.”
Myrtle was born after the Troubles of 1919-23, but she recalled her grandmother telling her about hiding her jewellery in a creeper outside her bedroom window when the IRA came to call, while her sister Moira would recall a train journey from Monkstown when she had to lie on the floor because of the bullets flying over her head.
Myrtle was sent to Frensham Heights, a progressive co-educational boarding school in the south of England, but her studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939 and she was transferred to the safer environs of Newtown, a Quaker school in Waterford, which was also co-educational and liberal in its ethos.
She was put in a dormitory with three other girls who, on hearing that she was from Cork, asked: “Do you know Ivan Allen? He’s rare!” She did not at that stage – Allen had left the school by the time she arrived – but a few years later she met him at a party at Ballymaloe House, a Georgian farmhouse near Cloyne, then owned by a friend of hers from Newtown. They married in 1943.
Allen, a Quaker who owned a market garden in Shanagarry, 23 miles southeast of Cork, eventually bought Ballymaloe House when its owners could no longer afford its upkeep, and the couple and the first two of their six children moved there in 1947.
The house was in a dreadful condition, Myrtle Allen recalled: “We seriously thought about pulling it down and building anew, but we just could not do it. We ended up dividing the house into two and renting the half we didn’t live in.’’
While her husband farmed the land, Myrtle Allen brought up their children, while indulging her love of cooking by studying cookery books and devouring culinary columns in the newspapers. By 1962 she herself was a cookery writer, having acquired a weekly spot in the Irish Farmer’s Journal.
It was when her youngest child was heading off to boarding school that Myrtle Allen thought about opening a restaurant. She started her business by placing an advertisement for “dinner in a country house” in the Cork Examiner. The Yeats Room Restaurant, as it was called (after Jack Yeats, whose paintings they collected), welcomed its first guests in May 1964.
At the time the best dining to be had in Ireland was in “silver-service” style establishments in big city hotels where food was elaborate, rich and complicated and where dining was a stilted social ritual. Myrtle Allen created an entirely different aesthetic – a relaxed environment where diners could enjoy home cooking with the very freshest of ingredients.
“The wonderful thing,” she recalled in her classic Ballymaloe Cookbook, first published in 1977, “was that we had this fantastic range of food, all absolutely fresh. We had a garden, so we had herbs and all the garden vegetables. We had our own eggs, pork and beef, and we had milk and cream coming up from the dairy.”
The Allens soon had customers coming from all over the country; they added rooms to the back of the house and opened a country guesthouse. Within two years the Egon Ronay Guide described the Yeats Room as “an outstanding example of what a good restaurant should aim to be”.
Though Myrtle Allen’s style of cooking was based on traditional ingredients and Irish culinary custom, her philosophy of using local produce and changing her menu daily to reflect the best offerings of the season was revolutionary in the 1960s.
In the 1970s, with Ballymaloe having earned a Michelin star (one of only two in Ireland at the time), Myrtle Allen agreed to take on a small Irish restaurant on the Place du Marché Saint Honoré in Paris that was not doing well, and introduce her ideas there, too.
By 1983 when the New York Times wrote a review of the establishment, diners were flocking to La Ferme Irlandaise and it was listed among the top ten “foreign restaurants” by a leading French guide. However the logistics of running restaurants in two different countries eventually proved too difficult.
The stint in Paris brought Myrtle Allen into contact with the world of international gastronomy and she went on to found the Irish division of Euro-toques, the European association of chefs and cooks, which is dedicated to promoting the use of local and seasonal produce. In the 1990s when a cheese stall run by a French couple in Cork’s English Market was forced out of business by health inspectors, Myrtle Allen founded the Free Choice consumer group to campaign on behalf of similar food businesses.
As her children grew up and married, they and their spouses and children became involved as well, though Myrtle Allen remained very much the dominant personality in the enterprise. The Ballymaloe business expanded to include what she called “spin-offs”. These included craft and kitchen shops, cafés, branded relishes and jams, a second restaurant in an art gallery in Cork, and her daughter-in-law Darina’s cookery school, regarded as one of the best in Europe.
Myrtle Allen’s husband Ivan died in 1998. She is survived by their children.
Myrtle Allen, born March 13 1924, died June 13 2018