Born: 12 March 1924, Ireland
Died: 13 June 2018
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Gladys Myrtle Hill
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Niav Gallager. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Allen, (Gladys) Myrtle (née Hill) (1924–2018), chef, food writer and hotelier, was born Gladys Myrtle Hill on 12 March 1924 in Bellevue Lodge, Lower Glanmire Road, Cork city, the youngest of two daughters (her older sister was Elisabeth Moira) to Henry Houghton Hill, architect, and his wife Mary Elizabeth (Elsie) Hill (née Stoker). Allen’s parents had long familial connections to the city – her maternal grandparents were in the cattle trade there, while her father Henry was the elder son of Arthur Hill, the architect responsible for remodelling the old Custom House, as well as the Victoria buildings, the science buildings at Queen’s College Cork (QCC, later University College Cork (UCC)), the Metropole Hotel and additions to the North Charitable Infirmary. For the first years of Myrtle Allen’s life, the family lived in Tivoli in the eastern suburb of Cork, later moving to St Aubyn’s in Monkstown, overlooking Cork harbour. On her first birthday, Allen’s parents gifted her a myrtle tree, and it remained a treasured possession throughout her life: it was first planted in Tivoli and then replanted in Monkstown. When she married and moved to Ballymaloe House with her new husband, the tree was brought with them and still stands in front of the house.
Childhood, education and early life
Allen had a conventional childhood, though with her older sister away at boarding school she was almost like an only child. Her father travelled to the city for work each day and her mother, who had a debilitating heart condition, took care of the domestic sphere. Perhaps because of her own ill health, Allen’s mother believed that good food contributed to good health and although the family diet was plain, the food was always of good quality. Between 1937 and 1939 Allen attended Frensham Heights, a progressive co-educational school in Surrey, England, that offered a child-centred education. However, the outbreak of war in September 1939 made crossing the Irish Sea treacherous and Allen instead became a boarder at Newtown School, Waterford, founded in 1798 by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) on the estate of the former home of Sir Thomas Wyse. There, Allen shared a room with two girls, one of whom, Joan Simpson, was from Ballymaloe, a farm in Shanagarry, Co. Cork. At Joan’s sixteenth birthday party Allen was introduced to (Richard) Ivan Allen in the dining room of Ballymaloe House. She recalled that later that same evening, at the Ballycotton Lifeboat dance, he ‘just assumed that I would marry him’ (Myrtle Allen: a life in food). Allen finished school in Newtown in 1941 and spent the following year doing a part-time cooking and dressmaking course at the School of Commerce and Domestic Science in Morrison’s Island, Cork. While Ivan remained serious in his intentions towards her – he mentioned marriage again whilst they sailed her boat in Cork harbour during the late summer of 1942 – Allen was not yet ready to commit and spent several months working in Belfast in a Quaker hostel for elderly people who had been bombed out of their houses. However, by Christmas of 1942 she was ready to accept, and the couple were married on 24 November 1943. Foreshadowing her love of homely comforts and emphasis on substance over style, Allen insisted on holding the wedding reception in her family home, and her memories of the honeymoon in Glenbeigh, Co. Kerry, centred on the delicious food that was produced over an open turf fire.
Ballymaloe House and The Yeats Room
The Allens moved into the Red House near Kinoith farm, Shanagarry, Co. Cork, 4km from Ballymaloe. Ivan had worked for Wilson Strangman on the farm since 1932, first as manager and then as his farming partner. Despite her year in the School of Commerce, Allen had no real knowledge of food preparation and on their first night in Shanagarry Ivan had to show her how to scramble an egg. Although she lacked practical knowledge, Allen was determined to learn to cook using the quality ingredients produced on the farm, and she taught herself using cookery books she had brought with her to Shanagarry, including The Aga cookery book (1934) and Philip Harben’s The way to cook (1945). She also favoured The country housewife’s handbook (1940) for its gardening tips and practical methods for preserving fruits and vegetables. With travel restricted due to petrol shortages during the Emergency (1940–46), and with meat and fresh produce in short supply unless sourced locally, Allen learned to cook using what was available and in season.
When Ballymaloe House, with c. 400 acres of farmland, was put up for auction by the Simpson family in October 1947, Strangman and Ivan Allen jointly purchased the house and farm for £12,000. While Ivan was able to begin farming the land immediately, the house required extensive refurbishment before Myrtle and their two young children could move in (four more children were born after they moved in). Architect Kenneth Bayes was engaged to modernise the house, a project that last until 1951 (the Allens moved into the house in 1948). In 1950 their friends Philip and Lucy Pearce moved into a wing of the house, where they lived until 1955. Though Philip had intended to partner with Ivan in running the farm, he agreed instead to invest in the farm business at Ballymaloe in exchange for ownership of the Old Glebe House in Kilmahon, where he opened Shanagarry Pottery in 1953. From 1955 the wing of Ballymaloe House previously occupied by the Pearces was let annually to holidaymakers.
The first decade of Allen’s married life was mostly conventional – she was a farmer’s wife with six children (Wendy, Natasha, Yasmin, Fern, Tim and Rory), a large house to maintain and farm workers to feed. Ballymaloe was a mixed farm that produced milk, butter, cream, eggs, pork and veal, alongside numerous fruits and vegetables, which Allen used to feed family and friends. The Allens were also heavily involved in Macra na Feirme, founded by Stephen Cullinan in 1944 to provide young farmers with training and social activities in rural areas. In 1959 Allen was appointed vice-president for the Munster region, but her bid for the presidency in 1963 was unsuccessful. From July 1962 Allen wrote a fortnightly food column for the Irish Farmers’ Journal, which she considered integral to her developing cookery skills: ‘Every two weeks I had to have a column ready … I got myself extra cookery books to just read and I had enough cop on to get the best people that were writing and then you’d have to go into the kitchen and do it and you’d have to adjust the recipe to the ingredients and then write it up and then publish it. So it was a great training’ (Mac Con Iomaire, 460). Allen continued to contribute cookery advice to the newspaper, albeit with diminishing frequency, until the 1970s.
By the early 1960s, with her older children away in boarding school, Allen discussed the possibility of doing ‘a bit of cooking’ with Ivan, who proposed opening a private dining room in their home, serving their farm produce (Hayter-Hames, 132). The notion of opening a private dining room featuring home-cooked farm produce was somewhat revolutionary in 1960s Ireland, where fine-dining restaurants almost exclusively featured French-style food. Allen had a new electric cooker installed and hired two young women to assist with the cookery, while furniture for the dining room was made from trees felled on the farm. On Saturday, 9 May 1964, The Yeats Room restaurant was opened in Ballymaloe House, named for the Allens’ collection of Jack B. Yeats paintings which were hung in the restaurant. From the outset, Allen was keen to involve her family in the venture. Her daughter Wendy came home from Switzerland and took over management of the dining room, while Allen cooked. Ivan took care of food production, ensuring Allen had the freshest ingredients available, and she tailored her menu accordingly – the menu was often not written until the evening and, unlike most fine-dining restaurants, was written in English and specified the origins of each ingredient (Allen was one of the first chefs to consider terroir applicable to food). Although The Yeats Room quickly acquired a reputation for excellence, business was modest until a visit from food critic Egon Ronay in 1966 introduced Allen’s enterprise to the wider public. In a stellar review, Ronay lauded Allen’s cooking and praised the restaurant as ‘an outstanding example of what a good restaurant should be’ (Egon Ronay–British Motor Corporation guide, 467). After that, bookings rapidly increased, though success also brought fresh challenges – under licensing laws the restaurant could only serve wine; in order to serve spirits, the business had to pivot to offering accommodation. Thus, from 1967 Ballymaloe officially became a guest house, open most of the year and serving three meals a day.
Allen’s staff grew in line with the business. In 1968 Darina O’Connell arrived at Ballymaloe as Allen’s sous-chef; two years later she married Allen’s eldest son, Tim. In 1974 Allen was one of eleven founding members of the Irish Country Houses and Restaurants Association (now known as Ireland’s Blue Book), formed to promote Ireland’s country house hotels. By that time Ballymaloe House was renowned for blending the intimacy of a private home with professional restaurant standards, and was a welcoming venue for Irish artists and musicians – Liam Clancy often sang for guests when he stayed, printer René Hague made wall-hangings for them, and drawings by Louis le Brocquy hung on the stairs.
Allen’s revolutionary culinary philosophy also garnered international recognition. In 1975 she became the first Irish woman to be awarded a Michelin star (held until 1980) and in 1981 accepted an invitation to run La Ferme Irlandaise in Paris; opened in 1979, it remained among the top ten international restaurants in the city for the five years of its existence. Ballymaloe House consistently featured in the Egon Ronay good food guides; in 1988 it was included in the Courvoisier book of best hotels; and in 1991 it featured in Harpers & Queen magazine’s list of the 100 best hotels in the world. In 1986 Allen was a founding member of the chefs’ organisation, Euro-Toques International, alongside Paul Bocuse, Gualtiero Marchesi and Juan Mari Arzak, and later served as president of the organisation (1993–7).
Ballymaloe also evolved and although the restaurant, guest house and farm remained central to the business, other ventures established by the family included a craft shop and café at Ballymaloe House in 1972. In 1983, Darina Allen and her brother Rory O’Connell opened the Ballymaloe Cookery School, while in 1986 the Allens opened a café in the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork. Developed in the early 1980s, Ballymaloe Country Relish became the first of several products sold by Ballymaloe Foods.
Allen’s dedication to championing Irish produce was absolute. While running La Ferme Irlandaise she travelled by ferry to France every Saturday evening after finishing restaurant service in Ballymaloe, her car packed with fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. In later years when holding cookery demonstrations in New York, she brought a suitcase filled with Irish apples in case the right kind of apple was not available. Allen was also committed to defending local produce and artisanal food, and when Martin Guillemot and Anne-Marie Jamand’s cheese stall in Cork’s English Market was closed by health inspectors, she founded the Cork Free Choice consumer group in 1989 to defend small producers and inform people where they could find fresh local ingredients.
Although not as widely published as more contemporary chefs, Allen’s cookbooks have remained in print since their publication. The Ballymaloe cookbook (1977; rev. 1984, 2001) is considered essential by most serious cooks. It clearly articulated her philosophy of cooking grounded in seasonality, simplicity and respect for ingredients, while her style of writing was revolutionary at the time, offering anecdotes, personal stories and tips to make life easier in the kitchen. In 1994 Allen handed the role of head chef to Rory O’Connell, though she remained involved in food preparation and the day-to-day running of the hotel.