818: Ireland’s National Culinary Treasure, Darina Allen
1/9/202649 min
This week, we’re spending the hour with the charming and beloved Irish cooking teacher and writer Darina Allen. It’s a spirited conversation about growing up in a country kitchen, her love of eating, and the single moment she decided to pursue her career in cooking. She tells us about her organic farm at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, shares her unusual and brilliant teaching style, and explains why learning to cook and connect to nature is one of the greatest life skills anyone can achieve. She leaves us with a recipe for an Irish classic, Spotted Dog Railway Cake. Darina is the author of many best-selling books, including The Forgotten Skills of Cooking: 700 Recipes Showing You Why the Time-Honored Ways Are the Best.
Broadcast dates for this episode:
- January 10, 2025 (originally aired)
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsFrancis Lam· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Hey, it's Francis. This week, we wanted to bring back an old episode, an hour-long interview with an absolute icon in Irish cooking, Darina Allen. Check it out. [upbeat music] I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM. [upbeat music] You know, I loved my culinary school experience. Every day, walking through those vaunted halls... Okay, most of the time it felt like I was in a basement, but whatever. Every day in those kitchens, I loved the skills I was learning from chefs, the proper knife cuts, even the discipline of wearing a uniform and that silly paper chef's hat, sweating it out over whether I would get the tamales steamed in time for the other students to come get their lunch. And then one day, many years later, I was talking with my friend Abra Berens. She's been on our show a whole bunch of times. She's terrific, a chef, farmer, and author, and she was telling me about her culinary school experience at a place called Ballymaloe in Cork, Ireland, and it was like nothing like mine. [laughing] At her school, it was about going out into the farm that the school is part of, learning how to grow and harvest vegetables, bringing them inside, and learning how to take care