She’s as much a force of nature as the wind that flings wet droplets across my camera lens as I snap rapid-fire shots and run to catch up, trailing her across the bucolic landscape. Darina Allen is one of Ireland’s best-known chefs, and the matriarch of Ballymaloe Cookery School: a sprawling, self-contained ecosystem of agricultural and culinary activity.
Perpetually a few steps ahead, she walks and talks at a steady pace without looking back, only breaking her cadence to address those who cross her periphery: telling the baker how many loaves are needed; inquiring after the amount of available greens; lamenting a plant’s ill-advised pruning. Ballymaloe is not a place—it’s a living, breathing organism whose appendages pulse with life. There are barns and bakeries, cellars and greenhouses, verdant fields that soon will burst bounteous from wet earth. As I scurry to catch up, I peer into open doorways full of rising sourdough and cheesemakers cutting curd, crouch between rows of thick kale and Brussels sprouts whose stalks stand like herds of tiny green elephants’ legs, and sidle into a lecture hall where a chef’s mirrored hands glide masterfully over his mise en place.
Allen founded the culinary school in 1983 with her brother, chef and instructor Rory O’Connell; their family home is now the Ballymaloe House. The grounds encompass an organic farm, restaurant, and various production facilities, but the most exciting feature is the fermentation room: a mad scientist’s bunker plunked in the middle of this green reverie. The white portable building is filled to bursting with bottles and jars full of bubbling, pungent, brightly colored substances. One day, I’m told, there may be a brewery; for now, they make cider, sauerkraut, and all manner of experimental things.
At the end of the tour, Allen dons her mask with smiling eyes and dissolves as mysteriously as she materialized, falling back into the ballet of the place and leaving me breathless with a pile of cheese cubes, a bottle of Ballymaloe cider, and a dream of trading my laptop for a knife set. The next night, when I share the cider with new friends over stories of my travels, I remember again why I do what I do.
Words + Photoby Holly Regan