Why Would You Go To Cooking School in Ireland?

settle in . . .

The first five days at Ballymaloe were kind of exciting and a little scary and a lot of exhausting. I mean, I haven’t used those freshman mixer social gears in 40 years! Everyone is super nice, the staff especially, but there are a whole lot of young people who seem to make friends instantly and my people, the cooks d’un certain âge shall we call us (CDCÂ), are a more reserved lot. And there is so much information coming in from every sense - it is beautiful here in Ireland in the spring, so much green and growing, birds making bird noises (thank you Merlin Bird ID for telling me it is the rooks who are so damn loud), cow and herb and dinner smells, leaves and flowers to touch and learn about and as for taste . . . ! Well, the title question here - the ONE YOU’VE ALL BEEN ASKING ME - AND EVERY OTHER YANK HERE - FOR THE PAST YEAR - has now been definitely answered in two simple phrases.

At first dinner: “And if you’d like some fresh jersey cream on your ice cream there is jug of that here, too.”

At first lunch: “There is a cheeseboard in the corner by the bread. We’ll start with the Irish farmhouse cheese and oh by the end of the course we’ll have gone through hundreds because we’ll have a cheeseboard every day at lunch.”

This is why you go to cooking school in Ireland: cream with your ice cream and a cheeseboard every day at lunch.

OK so some info about Ballymaloe - this is a cookery school focused on ingredients, which means, where they come from and how that matters to our health, our planet, but also our quality of life because the whole point is to make delicious food which will fuel our bodies healthily to lead good lives. So the very first thing we learn about is the soil. Which, because this farm has been organic for 25 years, is in pretty good shape. And it is made better here by the HEN BUCKETS. Everywhere there are food scraps, so every kitchen, there are one or more hen buckets. You put anything that doesn’t go in the stock scraps bucket (more about that later), or the candied peel/citrus firestarters bucket (also more about that later), into the hen bucket. Once a day, that is emptied into a skip over where the 650 chickens live (I am not making that up). The birds jump into the skip to eat, then they poo in it, and when that gets full¹, it is all dumped onto the compost pile and in about 9 months it will be beautiful rich humus full of worms (because something living in the soil means your soil is living!) to feed your garden where you will pick all manner of beautiful fruits and veg to turn into delicious dishes. And that kind of sums up how everything goes here - nothing wasted, everything used in service of deliciousness, with the added benefit of doing good by the earth and your gut. It starts with the soil, goes to the plant, then to the animal that eats the plant, and then to us humans. Basically, you are what you eat, eats, so it all better be good. Do you know what I’m sayin’?²

You’ll find a chicken or several pretty much anywhere you go - they have free run of the place except that they are absolutely NOT allowed in the kitchens (alive, anyway).

There are also absolutely beautiful gardens and plants of every kind of herb and veg and fruit which will grow here in Ireland, which is a LOT. And of course, it is all popping now in late April, maybe two or three weeks ahead of Boston, growing-wise? Our first morning we are given a long but also whirlwind (which is basically how everything goes here) tour of the grounds and the farm. We are shown how things grow together, many of the amazing plants that are just wild around here so are also part of our cooking, the fields not yet prepared because this was the wettest winter ever in Ireland (and that is saying a lot), the fields that are growing, the formal gardens and follies³, the glasshouses filled with more crops starting and growing, the cow shed and dairy, the chickens’ actual home and their Palais des Poulets where the brooding chickens and ducks hang out with their chickies, of course the school itself - three kitchens plus two demo kitchen/classrooms, the weigh-in rooms (where are the ingredients are stored), and the dining rooms (because you eat, you know, what everyone cooks!).

We learn about the basic plan of our curriculum, which seems to involve an excessive amount of paper in order to schedule - at odds with the reduce-waste ethos here but also, it’s rural Ireland so somehow appropriately old-school. On Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, we cook in the mornings, eat that for lunch, then have a three-hour demo in the afternoon of what we will cook the next day. We have a weekly partner (another student), and are assigned a station in kitchen, that is set up with all the equipment. We’re also assigned to an instructor for each week - just three pairs per instructor, so a strong 6:1 student-teacher ratio! For the cooking part, there are several dishes to be cooked each day, and we decide with our partner who will cook what. Critical to the process is the order of work prepared the night before, wherein we detail each step we’ll be taking for our chosen dishes, with the time. We have an assigned time between 8 and 8:40 a.m. for weigh-up⁴, which is where you and your partner go collect your ingredients. This is a bit chaotic - everyone bustling around a tiny space weighing their onions or flour or butter and searching for the rhubarb or the creamy milk all at once and all a bit nervy.⁵ We get to cooking at 9, aiming to have it ready for inspection by our instructor around noon, and served by 12:30. If we have time after lunch we dash back to the cottage and change out of our whites then back to the school for a demo of what we’ll be cooking tomorrow. After all that morning activity, it is hard to keep your eyes open during demo sometimes! A much-needed stretch break happens about halfway through. Then there is tasting after the demo and we are in theory done for the day - except for preparing our order of work for tomorrow.

Wednesdays are for lectures and special programming - cheese, wine, hygiene, restaurant management, and so on. On top of this there are required daily duties: you may be assigned to stock duty one day, tidy up the weigh-in area of your kitchen the next, pick salad leaves and veg (that’s an early one) on the third. Sometimes you have to add a loaf of bread to your cooking since this place runs on bread. For now, the only bread we can make is a classic Irish brown soda bread which is A-OK with all of us because it is incredibly easy and goes so well with the gloriously yellow homemade cultured butter that also fuels everything. It is the first thing you learn to make here, and soon we’ll all be doing it in our sleep.

Then there are extracurriculars like charcuterie and fermentation to which you are assigned over the course of the program AND THEN there are optional activities you can sign up for, like going with the school’s farm stand to the Midleton Farmer’s Market on Saturdays, or milking the cows and separating the cream, or a shift in the Ballymaloe House restaurant kitchen.

Somehow the young people find time and energy after all of this to go the pub. It’s all I can do to manage a walk on the beach (maybe a shockingly cold dip if the weather is fine), prep for the next day and have a snack and a gab with the housemates before getting in bed to catch up on the world.⁶

Housemates, yes. Most students live on campus, scattered about several cottages right next to the school. But a road and a kitchen garden separate the more charming but also older courtyard of cottages where the kids live from the two newer but significantly more comfortable cottages where the CDCÂ (need a better acronym for us, suggestions welcome) live, in Pennywort and Mrs. Walsh’s cottages. I’m in the former, with Sue (Ireland, near Dublin), Nicola (Kent, England), Jennifer (Texas), Christopher (London), Sangree (Pacific NW), and Lucy (Oxford, England). Three recently made redundant (what the Brits call laid off), one nurse, one therapist, one yoga teacher, and one assistant dean, so we’ve got most of the bases covered. We’re all more in the personal enrichment/me-time/maybe a new direction space, as opposed to the kids who are mostly in the career advancement/exploration space with a few here (I’m told) because mummy and daddy sent them.⁷

But I digress. Here in Pennywort, I have a spacious room with private bath, very quiet, very comfortable, great interwebs, couldn’t be happier with it. Our cottage also has an enormous kitchen and living room with wood stove, which has already hosted one shall we say lively gathering of the CDCÂ. And if I need more space, there is the glorious coast just minutes away.

More deets on first week doings to come - I’ve got farmer’s market duty in the morning!

1. Those gals will eat absolutely anything, so all manner of food goes into the hen buckets, and even paper. Eggshells are somewhat controversial, apparently, because there are those who claim they make the chickens more likely to peck at their own eggs. But we pooh-pooh that theory here so in they go.

2. I am hearing this phrase, or a variation on it like do you understand, are we happy with that, have you got it, all the time, particularly from our Irish presenters. Sort of a more articulate riff on the British “innit?”

3. A folly is a little structure in a garden that is purely for pleasure. There are three here - the most amazing of which is the Shell House.

4. I keep referring to this mistakenly as weigh-in, which is what jockeys and boxers and lightweight rowers do but seriously, after 12 weeks here I am going to be rowing ultra-heavyweight 🫨.

5. What we in the US call half-and-half but better because whole milk and the delicious cream, and you just measure it out yourself.

6. As I write this, I’ve just learned of the tent encampment at H, but of course have been following all the news from other schools, and the world. More about the Ballymaloe Bubble another time but jesusmaryandjoseph what a hash those Congressional “hearings” (more like the Virginia Foxx news ) have made of everything. I guess jesusmaryandjoseph is kind of the issue tho, do you know what I’m sayin’?

7. This blows my mind, and I don’t quite believe it. They just send them to fancy cooking school in Ireland because they don’t know what else to do with them? But it is true: some of them ARE impossibly young and come across as a bit feckless.