Simple Pleasures Are the Key Ingredient of This Culinary Adventure in Ireland

At a renowned cooking school in the Irish countryside, pleasure is found in simplicity.

“Your hand is a claw,” says Pam, a convivial Irish chef with 93 a shock of orange hair who is overseeing my class at the Ballymaloe Cookery School, set on 40 hectares of technicolour greenery in rural County Cork. “Your hand is your god-given whisk.” Forget fancy breadmakers, there’s nothing better than your own hand to mix the four types of flour, sesame seeds and bicarb of soda that, with some buttermilk, form a loaf of dense mahogany-brown soda bread.

“Sleeves up, lads!” encourages “lovely Maggie”, Pam’s deputy for the afternoon. “I taught her everything she knows – and has now forgotten,” trills Pam as she inspects my bowl. My hand is a claw. My hand is my god-given whisk. “Good luck!” she says, eyebrows raised as I dig in.

The half-day Just Cook It class, held periodically throughout the year, does exactly what it says on the tin and I’m joined by dozens of fellow food-lovers eager to learn at this hub of Irish cuisine. The famous school opened 41 years ago near Ballymaloe House, the hotel and restaurant founded by the first female Irish chef to receive a Michelin star, Myrtle Allen.

In the airy test kitchen, painted in Play School primary colours and dominated by a sprawling benchtop with ceiling mirrors positioned just-so to showcase Pam’s handiwork from above, I befriend Jennifer, a passionate baker from Iowa. We join forces with married couple Declan and Lesley, down from Dublin for the afternoon, and Dominique, who hails from France – she’s a keen cook who arrived with her own gleaming set of steel. “What did you do with your knives?” she asks me surreptitiously, unfurling a veritable arsenal of blades.

The school is a well-oiled machine, with classes that range from the afternoon blitz that I’m here for through to the full Eat, Pray, Love immersion of the live-in three-month course. As well as the soda bread, Pam shows us how to make a deceptively simple carrot soup, a garlicky vat of mussels, a perfectly seared rack of lamb, a roast carrot salad (it’s late September and carrots are in abundance) and a show-stopping upside-down apple cake. Each dish is manageable regardless of your culinary expertise and is wholesome and hearty – the kind of thing your gran might have made, according to Pam – with a focus on local ingredients. “If you can’t buy Irish,” she advises as she briskly dices a carrot, “buy the best you can afford.” But brightly hued Irish butter is the freshest; Irish mussels are the sweetest; Irish potatoes are the fluffiest. And Irish chefs? Well, if you ask our host, they’re the best in the world. After she breezily packs half a lifetime’s worth of cooking tips into a single afternoon – how to eyeball caramel to know when it’s about to burn; how to tell if a raw mussel has already gone bad; how to judge if a cake is ready without piercing it with a skewer – I can only agree.

“Pam’s fantastic, isn’t she?” says Eoin, who picks me up that evening after I’ve enjoyed the fruits of my labour at dinner. (Everyone agrees: our cake is the winner.) Eoin is a local guide who also happens to be married to Fern, one of Myrtle’s four daughters and the manager of Ballymaloe House. Myrtle died in 2018 and is survived by six children, 22 grandchildren and 45 great-grandchildren. Many of them are involved in the business; the Allens are minor celebrities in Ireland and are known as “the first family of food”. Today, Dervilla O’Flynn, wife of one of Myrtle’s grandsons, heads up the hotel kitchen.

“They’re keeping Mrs Allen’s legacy alive,” says Daphne, the reservations manager, as she shows me around the 33-room property. Ballymaloe House opened in 1964, first as a restaurant – Myrtle was head chef and her farmer husband, Ivan, would don a tuxedo to be sommelier each evening – and soon after as a hotel. It’s a picturesque stone Georgian house set in fields upon fields of the greenest grass you’ve ever seen.

“Are you ready for an adventure?” asks Daphne, leading me up a narrow tower that dates back to the 15th century. From the top, I can see all of Ballymaloe: the kitchen garden herbs and leaves under glass; the 366 apple trees from which chefs brew crisp cider; the chickens roaming in the fields; and in the distance, the edge of the cookery school, four kilometres down the road. “I love going up the tower. I’m up there all the time,” says Daphne with a sigh as we descend the steep stairs.

I’m struck by the fierce pride of everyone at Ballymaloe. Ireland and its food are at the forefront of everything they do. The hotel’s timber floors are made from old Jameson whiskey barrels and the antlers of an ancient Irish elk hang in the reception. At breakfast you can order the Full Irish – including two types of blood pudding and a lot of bacon – or porridge brimming with cream from the property’s cows. The main dining area is called the Yeats Room, named for artist Jack Yeats, whose paintings Ivan collected and that hang in the hotel.

I make my way to the Yeats one night for the renowned five-course dinner, my table-for-one set in the cosiest corner of the room. On the menu there are cheeses from Kerry and Tipperary, Rossmore oysters farmed by the husband of an Allen granddaughter, West Cork scallops, Irish halibut, Killarney venison and lobsters caught by an 80-year-old fisherman in the Ballycotton harbour. The dishes themselves might not be Irish – an entrée of fresh fettuccine pesto; Ballymaloe farm pork served porchetta-style – but the produce is. It’s cooked simply and with a reverence for provenance and seasonality that I now recognise as truly Irish. The halibut arrives dressed in nothing more than a Shanagarry tomato salsa and with an enormous potato drizzled in butter and herbs. Just like the food at the cookery school, this is classic, time-honoured fare, elevated by precise technique and superior ingredients.

“This is everyone’s favourite part,” a waiter tells me as she wheels in the Ballymaloe dessert trolley. Tonight, there are poached pears in decadent chocolate sauce, scoops of vanilla ice-cream, chocolate and coconut meringues, raspberry tarts, an oversized berry trifle and elegant langues de chat biscuits. “You can have as much as you like,” she says. So I do. The chocolate meringues are delicate and the raspberry tart a delicious little morsel but the poached pears, plucked from the garden that morning, are unforgettable. Generous portions, warm-hearted hospitality and almost everything covered in cream? It doesn’t get more Irish than that.

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