Allen, 94, known for Irish recipes
Myrtle Allen, who defined the modern era of Irish cooking by using a bounty of locally sourced ingredients at Ballymaloe House, the renowned restaurant she created in her Georgian country home in the 1960s, died Wednesday in Wilton, a suburb of Cork City. She was 94.
Darina Allen, a daughter-inlaw who runs the offshoot Ballymaloe Cookery School, said the cause was pneumonia.
Allen opened her restaurant in Ballymaloe House in 1964, having bought the property and its 300-acre farm with her husband in 1948. Originally the site of a 15th-century Anglo-Norman castle, the house, an imposing, ivy-covered stone landmark near Shanagarry, County Cork, was largely rebuilt around 1820.
The restaurant soon came to symbolize the farm-to-table movement promoted by American chef Alice Waters. And it helped make Irish cooking competitive with French and Italian cuisine, receiving a onestar rating (out of a possible three) from the Michelin Guide in 1975.
“She is the Holy Grail, the mother ship,” food writer Allen Jenkins wrote this year in the British publication Observer Food Monthly. “She is where Irish food began.”
Eschewing recipes from the French culinary canon, Allen created dishes based on the food around her. From her 2-acre walled garden came vegetables and herbs. Her freerange hens supplied the eggs. Fish came from the small fishing boats of the seaside village of Ballycotton 4 miles to the southeast, and shellfish arrived from Kenmare Bay in west Ireland. Meat was raised on neighboring farms. Cheese came from a local artisan.
Gladys Myrtle Hill was born in Tivoli, a suburb of Cork City, on March 12, 1924. Her father, Henry, was an architect. Her mother, Elsie (Stoker) Hill, was a homemaker.
Myrtle graduated from a boarding school in Waterford and attended Cork College of Commerce. She met Ivan Allen, a farmer, at a fundraising event at Ballymaloe, and they married when she was 19.
She had never cooked until then and received her first lesson, from her new husband, when they returned from their honeymoon. He taught her one of his bachelor favorites: scrambled eggs and mushrooms.
Their purchase of Ballymaloe in 1948 fulfilled Ivan Allen’s dream to own a farm. Myrtle Allen went on to cook for her husband, six children and farmhands, using what the farm produced: milk, butter, eggs, fruit, vegetables, and homeraised pork and veal.