FOOD AND TRAVEL

Inspiration and Recipes from an Irish Garden

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Irish Farmland

It is spring in Ireland and for lunch the 35 or so students are preparing soups and salads with not just what’s in the garden but what some might call weeds: nettles and dandelions. There’s also a roast duck (the subject of today’s cooking demonstration), an asparagus soup with lemon zest and lovely gooseberry and rhubarb tarts. Blue-checked tablecloths cover the outdoor tables where family-style meals are served on large platters and in big bowls. Not a speck of food is wasted—in an afternoon cooking demonstration, leftover gravy from the duck becomes the base of soup. All other scraps are composted or fed to the livestock.

The food that is coming from Ballymaloe might seem a long way from the corned beef and boiled cabbage we traditionally associate with Irish cooking, but thanks to the Allens, and a rocketing economy, the Emerald Isle’s new cuisine has prompted the creation of a number of world-class restaurants and hotels. “Our country had to live without ample food for so long, we learned to appreciate it and where it comes from all the more,” explains Darina Allen, referring to the potato famine that decimated Ireland’s population in the mid-19th century.

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