Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland's Most Famous Guest House

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Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland's Most Famous Guest House

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Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland's Most Famous Guest House Overviews

Welcome back to Ballymaloe! When it was originally published ten years ago, Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House was hailed as an instant classic. Legions of Irish-Americans, tourists familiar with the guest house, and gourmets intrigued by an oft-neglected cuisine clamored for this groundbreaking cookbook devoted to traditional Irish dishes. Easy yet elegant recipes for Irish stew, batter-fried fish filets, mutton pies, colcannon, apple cake, and Ballymaloe's trademark brown bread did not disappoint. Now, in a completely redesigned edition, Stewart, Tabori & Chang is proud to bring this heirloom collection of recipes into the twenty-first century.

Ballymaloe House evokes a time and place when summer meant freshly squeezed lemonade and sorbet made of plump blackberries picked right from the brambles; when breakfast was a multi-course meal to be savored, from the stone-ground oatmeal to the buttery scones to the robust sausages; when the making of plum pudding, months in advance, signaled the beginning of the Christmas season. This tranquil way of life still exists at County Cork's legendary countryside inn, where proprietress and master chef Myrtle Allen presides over a kitchen that prepares seasonal dishes from the incomparably fresh local produce.

In chapters ranging from soups and starters to desserts and drinks, the 100 recipes in Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House have been specially selected and adapted for the American home. Mrs. Allen introduces each one in her own charming prose, and her witty descriptions bring Ballymaloe to life.

Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland's Most Famous Guest House RelateItems

Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland's Most Famous Guest House Specifications

Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Balymaloe House, first published in 1990 and now reissued, is a modern classic. Written by the proprietor and chef of Ireland's most famous guesthouse, the book presents a farm-fresh cuisine miles removed from the common notion of Irish cooking as savorless or indelicate. Most especially, it offers the voice, recollections, and culinary wisdom of a woman who has seen and understood much since she and her husband bought Balymaloe House in 1947. Cooks of all kinds will delight in Allen's observations (of her refusal to put carrots in a traditional Irish stew: "As this is a folk dish, I feel that the common practice carries its own authority") and hasten to try such recipes as Lettuce and Mint Soup, Baked Rainbow Trout in Spinach Sauce, and Beef with Stout.

Chapters explore soups and starters through breads, desserts, and drinks, and offer 100 or so accessible recipes for everyday and special-occasion dining. Present are traditional Irish favorites, including Dingle pies (a spiced mutton dish), Colcannon (potatoes mashed with cabbage), and brown soda bread, as well as the likes of Danish Liver Paté, Mussels with Mayonnaise, and Turnedos with Mushrooms. Readers with a sweet tooth will want to try Allen's Almond Meringue Gâteau with Chocolate and Rum Cream and Blackberry Sorbet, and an exemplary trifle featuring almonds, cherries, and angelica. Illustrated with color photos throughout, the book is a cook's treasure with delightful, sometimes provocative thought. --Arthur Boehm

Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House: Featuring 100 Recipes from Ireland's Most Famous Guest House CustomerReview

`Myrtle Allen's Cooking at Ballymaloe House' by Myrtle Allen is a really great collection of typically Irish recipes from a very personal point of view. In a sense, this book has as much or more in common with the great Savannah family restaurant book ` Mrs. Wilkes' Boardinghouse Cookbook' than it does with the average collection of Irish recipes. Not only are both books about local restaurant / hotels with a national reputation, they are also both books of incredibly simple recipes.

On the matter of the personal material, Myrtle Allen's book is far superior than the volume done in Mrs. Wilkes' name, since we are certain that all the anecdotes are first person memories, written by Ms. Allen herself.

The appearance of this book may give one the impression that it is not much more than a book length advertisment for the restaurant and Inn created by Ms. Allen and her husband and enhanced with the cooking school started by her daughter-in-law, Darina Allen and son, Tim Allen. Having seen a few such books, I can assure you it is not such a book. The extent to which it invites you to want to visit Ballymaloe House in County Cork is based entirely on a genuine feeling of dedication to hospitality, culinary arts, and natural attraction of the Irish landscape.

Not that Ballymaloe House needs much promotion. It is easily the best known rural hospitality hot spot in Ireland. I have seen Darina Allen on at least two different Food Network shows plus prominent mentions in `Martha Stewart Living'. So, it is the book which benefits from the preexisting reputation of the Inn, restaurant, and cooking school rather than the other way around.

Reading this book gives me the same kind of epithanies I experienced when I visited Germany and discovered that in the land which bred the dachshund dog, it was the long haired variety which was much more common on the streets in the Rhineland than the far more practical short haired variety which would have been more suitable for its original use as a badger hunter. My epithany with this book is the fact that contrary to conventional wisdom in the United States, it is not white flour soda bread which is the traditional Irish bread, but a brown (whole wheat) soda bread which is actually commonly served in Ireland, at least in Cork and at Ballymaloe restaurant(s).

For a book retailing for .50 with an advertised 100 recipes, this is an exceptionally well designed and photographed book. Of course, photogenetic Ireland has a lot to do with this, but the book takes full advantage of the Emerald Isle's photo opps.

Returning to the comparison with Mrs. Wilkes' book on her Savannah establishment, the recipes in this book and that are all remarkably simple, but touch some very interesting territory in their simplicity. The first little delight is the recipe for a `tomato ring', moulded from a variation on a tomato juice recipe, by adding gelatin and leaving out water and olive oil. There may be some recipes which do involve some unfamiliar procedures such as that very French technique of making a garnish of hard boiled egg yolks by pushing them through a strainer. This may strike one as tedious, until you so it once or twice and appreciate the great effect it has on the dish and your diners' appreciation of the dish. So, while everything here is simple, there may be a few things which do not strike you as easy or familiar.

Sometimes, the titles for some recipes may be misleading to our American eyes, as with the recipe for `billy's french dressing' which is much more like a true French vinaigrette than it is like that mysteriously salmon colored preparation we knew so well in the supermarket. And yet, it has its own distinctly Irish touches, including watercress, which is actually the original shamrock, displaced later by clover.

I am impressed with page after page of really simple recipes, most with relatively few ingredients and simple preparation steps. The average American amateur cook may find a few ingredients which are hard to find at the local megamart, such as lovage or nettles. There are also a few vaguely inexact expressions of ingredient types, such as `mild wine vinegar'. This is ambiguous on two counts. First, does it mean a mild taste? Second, does it mean low acidity? If the latter, then the very best may be rice wine vinegar. White wine vinegar would be a clear mistake, as its acidity is higher than red wine vinegar, although it may be misconstrued, by being light in color, as being milder than red wine vinegar.

But, I am happy to say all measurements have been made in U.S. friendly terms. Everything is just as exact as it has to be, but no more.

In my search for the very best Irish cookbook, this one ranks high among those I have seen already. You will not be disappointed if you pick this book to represent Ireland in a working collection of international cookbooks.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored:Feb 06, 2010 23:50:15

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