Customer Reviews

Darina Allen's Ballymaloe Cooking School Cookbook

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I am a cookbook addict. Many times I have been asked if I could have only one cookbook what would it be? I never had an answer until I read this book.
So many basic teaching cookbooks focus on mainly american cuisine. I love the global focus of this book, great recipes from many different cultures all with very clear instructions that make it a perfect book for beginners and advanced cooks.

I am a professional chef and have reviewed many cookbooks. This cookbook is one of the best I have ever seen and used. I was so impressed by it that I went and attended the 13 week course at the School in Ireland. The recipes are timeless,delicious,and will work every time if followed properly. This is what cooking should be fresh, beautiful, and nutritious.

The `ballymaloe cooking school cookbook' by school co-owner and Irish TV cooking show host, Darina Allen is my second volume in my search for the perfect Irish cookbook. As it turns out, this very heavy and long (639 pages) book is much, much more than a book about Irish cooking, as well it should be, since it is comparable to the Culinary Institute of America's textbook, `The New Professional Chef'. That is, it is a general textbook for essentially all styles of European and American cooking, with a tendency to include more Irish recipes than you would expect from a French or Italian cooking textbook. In fact, a quick browse reveals recipes from around the world, many with an attribution to a close Darina Allen friend, such as Marcella Hazan.

When I saw Darina Allen on the old Sara Moulton show, `Cooking Live' on the Food Network, I had no idea that her Ballymaloe Cooking School was so big and well established to support such a comprehensive volume.

Ms. Allen's general tone in this book follows much the same path as the Chez Panisse guru, Alice Waters in that it strongly emphasizes good, fresh ingredients and a philosophy to waste nothing. Even the most lowly scraps can be recycled in the compost heap or the stock pot.

Unlike Ms. Allen's `The Festive Food of Ireland', I am happy to say that these recipes give all their units in an uncluttered and familiar English system of units, such as pounds and ounces, cups, tablespoons and teaspoons. I was just a bit surprised to see Ms. Allen recommend using standard spoons out of the silverware drawer to measure for savory recipes. On one hand, this is brilliantly simple, since a standard teaspoon (5 ml) is a rounded `teaspoon' and an English tablespoon (20 ml) is a rounded soupspoon. One important difference to note here is that the English (and Canadian) tablespoon is 25% larger than the American tablespoon (15 ml).

The book covers a very broad range of subjects, featuring 24 chapters on stocks & soups; appetizers; eggs; rice, other grains, & legumes; pasta and noodles; vegetables; salads; fish & shellfish; poultry; lamb; pork & bacon; beef; variety meats; game; desserts; cheeses; cakes & cookies; breads, scones & pizzas; jams & preserves; breakfast; barbecue; finger foods; drinks; and sauces.

One of the first things that struck me about this book is that it delves into subject which few if any other cooking texts touch, such as shopping, fashion, kitchen safety, and manners at the table. Many of the book's more conventional sections are a bit off. The `cupboard basics' section violates the notion that you should never buy an ingredient unless you have definite plans to use it in a recipe in the next week. Ms. Allen's list includes things such as dried fruit, Carr's Water Biscuits, Nam Pla (fish sauce), Pesto, and Ballymaloe's own brands of Tomato Relish and Jalapeno Relish. I would make pesto myself and I don't anticipate using nam pla, harissa, tortillas, Carr water biscuits, or chorizo in the next month, and maybe not even in the next year. The same general comment can be made of the `essential kitchen equipment' list. I always go back to Madhur Jaffrey's sound advice to simply make the recipes you want and buy for only those recipes. Sooner or later, you will have built up a pantry and assembly of cooking tools to match your personal style.

I do not weigh this too heavily against Ms. Allen, as she also has great advice on what to do if your power fails on your freezer or if you plan to move and are dealing with a full freezer.

Although this is a text for training future professional chefs, many of the classic recipes are remarkably unfussy. The master recipe for chicken stock cooks for only 3-5 hours, and adds all the vegetables at the beginning of the cooking rather than waiting for the last hour. Similarly, the master recipe for the basic omelet only cites one basic kind of French omelet and leaves out at least one of the fussier steps I have heard from various sources. The recipe for scrambled eggs is also not quite as fussy as the classic French method requiring a double boiler (bain marie).

Some techniques are illustrated with a set of photographs illustrating the steps, but these tend to be small and some major techniques are not so illustrated.

True to the author's emphasis on raw materials and the fact that the school has its own farm for vegetables, eggs, and fresh herbs, the introductory paragraphs to each section are rich in advice on how to pick and use raw materials. The introduction to eggs, one of my favorite subjects, is especially good on identifying the best eggs (how long ago was it laid) for each job.

Overall, this is an excellent reference for all sorts of recipes. I happened to check out the recipe for `basic hamburgers' and found a recipe that exactly duplicated my projected improvement over Julia Child's favorite hamburger recipe. Where Miss Julia has us put sautéed garlic and onion sandwiched between two layers of ground meat, Ms. Allen recommends the sautéed savories be mixed in with the ground meat, together with egg. A surprising touch recommends we also wrap it in caul fat, but this is optional.

One thing you will find in this book that you will not find in a CIA tome is a very personable, comradely tone which almost places Ms. Allen at your right hand as you read through the recipes. That means you will have a lot more fun reading this book than you may with a CIA text.

If you are very new to cooking, I highly recommend this as a first cookbook, especially if your ancestry can be traced back to the Emerald Isle! But, this is much, much more than a cookbook of Irish recipes.

I had the good fortune to take a three-day "cookery" course from Darina Allen at her school in County Cork. She is the Julia Childs of Ireland. The demonstrations were great and then the students got to cook selected recipes the next morning. I recommend this book because it has 1. tested and easy-to-follow recipes. (The school always has students and instructors working from the written recipes.) 2. The Irish specialties, particularly the breads, are wonderful. Ireland is now a "foodies" paradise with hundreds of homemade cheeses and other artisan specialties, superb seafood, and a whole "slow food" movement. This cookbook is in its way a bible to what's going on. It is one you will use again and again.

I am a professional cook and a cookbook collector and have been to the Ballymaloe Cookery School. I got this book for myself because I was so pleased with the school and felt it was a good basic source book. I ended up giving it away at a bridal shower to a young American on her way to Sweden to marry. It was then I realized what a great cookbook this is for beginning cooks/ for Americans living abroad and for Europeans living here in the US because of the measurement equivalents as well as the very global recipes. Great down to earth and humorous writing as well as clear and concise instructions.I'm ordering another for myself.
Marcia Dunsmore

The recipes are excellent and interesting, the commentary is informative and educational. The emphasis on seasonality is a good reminder of the real growing cycle of food, and the fairly simple treatment of ingredients highlights the flavor of well grown ingredients.

I spend a lot of money on cookbooks, and a lot of time cooking - usually for my wife and myself but I can cope with up to 10 guests if absolutely necessary. A long time ago, I realised that a lot of so-called professional chefs are little more than confidence tricksters, able to present hugely complex meals generally finished off (by which I mean ruined) with a blow-lamp, but totally lacking in basic skills. For example, I could cite one famous cookery school that presents a recipe for a simple biscuit that literally could never work. Another school advises a method for fried eggs that can only be described as cremation! Yet another Michelin-starred chef fries an egg so slowly that it has no structure and the texture of leather. How do I know? I like to try methods to destruction, and always give the benefit of the doubt.

Darina Allen's book gives excellent methods for both fried eggs and Anzac biscuits, plus hundreds of other recipes that so far have worked equally well! But that's not all. It's also packed with information and advice that can only make you a better cook. Better not only in the sense of presenting more enjoyable food, but more self-confident and better able to think for yourself about what works and what doesn't. If you are at all like me, this will save you a lot of money in useless cookbooks and, at last, give you the courage to throw out the dross you've already accumulated. But it won't all be saving - Darina is still writing!

PURCHASED AFTER SEEING JAMIE OLIVER FOOD SHOW ON IRELAND. HE SHOWED THE COOKING SCHOOL AND I WAS INSTANTLY INTERESTED. BEING OF IRISH DESCENT BUT WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF IRISH CULINARY SKILLS WHEN THE FIRST THING I MADE WAS FABULOUS I KNEW I HAD HIT IT BIG.

I attended the Ballymaloe Cookery School and thought Darina Allen's recipes and presentation was "spot on!!" I came home and ordered her cookbook immediately. The bread recipes (especially the grainy, wheaty breads) are terrific. Her recipe measurements are perfect. Her ethnic recipes are also wonderful.

My copy is this book is a total mess, which in my view is a great sign of a cookery book! I find it a great reference book in the kitchen. While I do find a lot of the recipes very buttery/creamy I do find that whenever I get an idea for something I would like to cook, I will find a basic recipe in there, which I can adapt or merge with a recipe I find online. I recently bought this book as a gift for Irish friends living in the USA, my idea was to give them 'a taste of home' to be constantly at their fingertips. They seemed very happy with it.