Forgotten Skills Spring To Life With Ireland's Darina Allen
In July 2004, I attended the enchanting Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland and wrote about it in a feature story for The New York Times Travel Section.
Without a doubt, my one-week hands on cookery class was one of my all time favorite courses. Sitting in the midst of a 100-acre certified organic farm and owned by Ireland’s award-winning Darina Allen, the Ballymaloe Cookery School is simultaneously grounding and inspiring.
Darina is a mother, a wife, a granny, and an amazing cookery teacher and author. Her food is without a doubt some of the best I have ever eaten. Her down-to-earth teaching style encourages experimentation and breeds confidence.
Darina Allen’s latest book, Forgotten Skills of Cooking, will be released tomorrow, which is Saint Patrick’s Day. I have an advance copy in hand, and it’s an amazing gift. When I learned from Darina nearly six years ago, she often focused on Irish traditions and “forgotten skills.”
She rarely assumed that her students knew how to butcher a chicken or make butter. She often added personal anecdotes while teaching, and she wholeheartedly encouraged us to rise early in order to help milk her Jersey cows. And, on more than one occasion, she assured us that it was easy to keep hens in the backyard.
Shortly after my visit in 2004, Darina started her Forgotten Skills cookery courses in which she tackled such topics as "How to Grow Your Own Organic Vegetables" and "How to Make Butter, Yogurt and Simple Cheese."
Forgotten Skills of Cooking is a 600-page treasure trove gleaned from Darina’s experience working on the front lines. By teaching and standing alongside her students, Darina has gleaned a keen understanding of how culinary expertise has evolved or failed to evolve. She knows that many of her students often lack skill simply because the knowledge hasn’t been handed down to them. She attributes a lot of this to the rise in convenience foods. The book is hefty and indeed Darina cracks the culinary code on every page. Of course, she includes carefully written and tested traditional recipes, but she expands on those recipes and clearly explains the hows and whys.
Darina understands that traditional recipes can certainly be found in old cookbooks, but she also intuitively knows that those old recipes can be useless for a novice cook because the instructions assume a lot critical knowledge. Thankfully, Forgotten Skills of Cooking is now bridging the gap.
In her chapter on Foraging, for example, Darina identifies different wild foods such as mushrooms and periwinkles, but she also tells readers how to gather them and how to clean them. In her chapter on Game, she carefully explains how to tell the age of game and how to hang it. And in her section on drying, she doesn’t just tell readers how to dry citrus peel, she tells them how to use it in various stews.
I believe that Darina's latest tome is bound to become a classic. As we reach for more local foods and strive to create more out of less, it's critically important to have books such as this one on hand and at the ready. Thank you, Darina!
Photo courtesy of Ballymaloe Cookery School
--Melissa A. Trainer
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