On to Ballymaloe

As I mentioned earlier, Tom and I were in Ireland twenty years ago and we weren't that impressed. However, by sheer dumb luck at the time we happened upon a hotel called the Ballymaloe House in a little hamlet called Shanagarry in County Cork. In those days we used to get a car and just drive without hotel reservations and we would check the various guidebooks and call ahead when we found something that sounded nice. I remember finding this place in the book, calling, and their saying yes they had a room but it was Sunday night and they weren't serving their usual 5-7 course dinner, but rather there was a buffet on Sunday night (I could swear they called it a pot-luck but I can't be sure). I was a little disappointed--pot-luck conjures up images of left-overs--but it was getting late and we couldn't risk not finding something else suitable so we booked.

Bottom line, we have never forgotten that hotel, the "pot-luck" turned out to be a vast gourmet array of the finest food we had ever eaten, the room and atmosphere and hospitality were all superb, and we vowed that if we ever came back to Ireland it would be to Ballymaloe. Today we were going to return to Ballymaloe.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that the price has gone up about 600% since we stayed that Sunday night in the 1980's, so I was a little nervous about subjecting Mary and Neil (not to mention ourselves) to a place that could very well have hiked its prices but gone to seed in the interim. But early on Mary and Neil were good sports and said go for it, so we booked several months ago for a two night stay. We even arranged our stay so that we would be there for the Sunday night "buffet."

To increase my nervousness, I talked to another guest at the Pier House who, when hearing we were off to Ballymaloe, sniffed that things were not like they used to be and she hoped we wouldn't be disappointed. So it was with some apprehension, yea even dread, on my part as we made our way over country roads the twenty miles or so from Kinsale to Shanagarry and drove up to the old farmhouse. I shouldn't use the word dread, after all it is a famous place, but you know what they say--that you can never go back, and my big fear was that it wouldn't be as before. Remember what happened with the Bangkok dinner cruise.

Wonder of wonders, it was exactly as before. We had the Blue Room and Mary and Neil had the Yellow Room, both of which had French doors that opened onto a meadow, beyond which was a fenced area with wild turkeys, guinea hens, peacocks and pea-hens, roosters and chickens with babies, ducks and geese, a small lake with an island, and arrayed with the most incredible flowers and vegetation you can imagine.

Ballymaloe is a centuries old country house turned into a hotel in the '60's by one Ivan Allen and his wife Myrtle who single-handedly changed the world's perception of Irish cooking from inedible to gourmet. Myrtle started a "cookery" school on the premises and soon had a branch in Paris. The property itself is still, and has always been, a working farm with sheep, pigs, and all manner of fowl, and gardens where they raise most of the vegetables and fruits consumed. Although Myrtle's beloved Ivan died in 1996, the entire family is still engaged in this enterprise and now that she is 83 the family is extended indeed.

After we got settled into our rooms, we all walked across the meadow and went through the gate (NO DOGS!) to explore the variety of fowl inside. The peacocks and turkeys and all the other feathered creatures were right there close enough to touch and unaffected by our presence. I'm pretty sure they will all show up on the dinner table at some point (well, not the peacocks), but they didn't seem to know that and therefore were oblivious and quite content. All of a sudden Mary and I heard a terrible screeching and clucking and when we looked for the source we saw a chicken who had gotten herself stuck in the lower branches of a tree. The poor creature was truly beside herself wriggling, flapping her wings (to the extent possible), and making strangled high-pitched noises, all the while a prisoner of a tangle of brambly branches. Mary and I were all but ready to lend a hand (never a good idea, I know), when with one super-hen effort she forced herself through the bramble and came tumbling out of the tree with a screech. She literally fell onto the ground, but with a shudder and with great dignity, she picked herself up and waddled off. We were so relieved.

We walked a lot of the grounds that first afternoon and Ballymaloe is truly a haven of tranquility, beautiful landscaping, park benches strategically placed for relaxing here and there, an occasional errant soccer ball on the lawns, a swimming pool (no water yet, too early in the season), croquet on the front lawn, and flowers everywhere. There is even a nine-hole golf course where several gents were knocking around a few balls.

On the far side of the property, there is a vast field of what we recongized as rapeseed, a beautiful yellow plant that is a source of an oil used only industrially, principally to make bio-fuel or ethanol. Tom and I knew it from France where it stretches for miles and blankets the ground with the most brilliant yellow. We found out later that the Allens had just planted the crop last year and have great hopes for its profitability. They have 400 acres after all and may as well use it for something besides croquet and golf. They are clearly very entrepreneurial. One of the grandsons has partnered with a chum and started a catering and packaged food business called Cully and Sully. One of their elegant trucks was parked on the premises and Mary and I thought how cool it would be to have a party catered by them and have one of those teddibly Irish/English looking trucks parked in front of our house.

Next to the rapeseed field sit some of the family homes. We walked over and saw what had to be Rory Allen's home--we could see guitars and other stringed instruments hanging from the wall through the window. Rory is Myrtle's oldest son (I think) and spent his youth tending the farm and the hundreds of sheep and raising his family, but now that he is 50-something he has had time to pursue his first love, music. He plays guitar and all manner of stringed instruments and sings in the drawing room every Saturday or Sunday night and attracts a following of locals including a resident "poet laureate" and a teller of jokes as well as those staying in the hotel like us. His songs are so typically Irish. One tells the story of Jack Doyle, a real live boxer from the old days, who didn't make it to the top because of "the drink." It's called The Contender, maybe a reference to Brando's tragic line from A Streetcar Named Desire, "Blanche, I coulda been a contendah!" Another is called the Fairy Tale of New York City and tells of young Irish emigrating to the New World and all the high hopes they had and how hard it was to adjust and make a living, and then the plaintive line "I love you, baby, there's gonna be good times...when all...our dreams...come true." Note that the title of the song is "A Fairy Tale.." Really beautiful and so sad, makes you understand how the Irish can start sobbing at the first verse of O Danny Boy.

Of course, he sings happy and funny songs as well, like the story of two sisters, Kitty who was remarkably pretty, but I can't say the same for Jane. The father offers to throw in his prize heifer to the lad who will choose Jane the plain one over Kitty the pretty one. The lad in the song telling the tale is so torn with indecision that he waits too long and misses them both. Rory plays some lovely instrumentals as well, some his own compositions. He has two CDs, made without benefit of professional sound studio, which of course we bought and listened to throughout the rest of our Irish drive. We can't wait for our Irish musician sons to hear them.

We were going to tour around the area the next day, but we were so happy just being on the grounds of this lovely place that we stayed there and walked and read and relaxed and repaired after seven weeks of guides and schedules. And that day was Sunday and guess what? The buffet was everything we remembered and more. Beautiful fresh oysters that you can actually trust to eat, mussels, clams, umpteen kinds of fish and meat pates from smooth and silky to country coarse, lobster bites on thin cucumber slices, all manner of meats (which I never even got to) and vegetables and salads, and fine cheeses, all beautifully presented. I can barely remember the dessert trolley, but I know it was awesome. We had asked earlier if we could stay another day and by some miracle we could.

The next day we did venture out and it was the only day of the entire trip that it actually rained! At least the only time when we had to walk in it. We went to Youghall (pronounced Yawl for the benefit of us Texans I guess, and the setting for the movie Moby Dick) and Ardmore, two authentically rugged seaside towns. We ate lunch in a charming place called Aherne's, the surname of Mary's beloved Uncle John who died last year at the age of 93, so that made all of us happy, especially Mary. We lifted our pints in a toast to Uncle John. And we got to use the umbrellas that we had been dragging around for weeks and we didn't mind the rain at all.

Three days after our arrival at Ballymaloe, we left again vowing to return. Mary and Neil vowed to return as well.