818: Ireland’s National Culinary Treasure, Darina Allen

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

American Public Media

Food, Arts

4.2 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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

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0:00.0	The Splendium Table was supported by Vitamix. You know, there are some essential cooking tools that have spanned generations, cross continents, and found their way into kitchens around the world. I'm thinking of the cast iron pam, the rolling pin, the mortar and pestle. But all of those were innovations at one point, and the high-powered Vitamix blender takes its place in that pantheon.
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1:05.3	That's onepassword.com slash podcast offer, all lowercase.
1:15.6	Music word.com slash podcast offer. All lowercase. I'm Francis Lamb, and this is the splendid table from APM.
1:34.4	You know, I loved my culinary school experience.
1:37.5	Every day, walking through those vaunted halls.
1:42.4	Okay, most of the time it felt like I was in a basement, but whatever, every day in those kitchens,
1:45.5	I loved the skills I was learning from chefs, the proper knife cuts, even the discipline of wearing a uniform and that silly
1:51.1	paper chef's hat, sweating it out over whether I would get the tamales steamed in time for the
1:56.1	other students that come get their lunch. And then one day, many years later, I was talking with my friend, Abra Barans.
2:03.9	She's been on a show a whole bunch of times.
2:05.6	She's terrific.
2:06.4	A chef, farmer, and author.
2:08.7	And she was telling me about her culinary school experience.
2:11.8	At a place called Ballymalu in Cork, Ireland.
	...

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