Finding the perfect blend
It was a TV producer attending a short cookery course at Ballymaloe Cookery School who suggested that Rachel Allen should do her own TV show. Pregnant with her second child (her son Lucca who’s now 13), Rachel had little thought of a career in media.
As it turned out, she was a natural before the cameras. Warm and engaging, her cooking shows demonstrating and demystifying the intricacies of baking and cooking, have seen her fan following grow far beyond the shores of her native Ireland.
Rachel Allen: In Colombo (above) and left, at work . Pic by M.A. Pushpa Kumara
Her new show ‘ Rachel’s Coastal Cooking’ soon to be aired on Irish TV will take viewers on an adventurous trail along the wind-swept Irish coast to discover with her the foods of her emerald isle.
This weekend though, Rachel Allen is in another emerald isle, treading warmer golden beaches in the company of the country’s Prime Minister judging the entries for the Galle Biryani Festival.
At the festival on Sunday, Rachel herself will be cooking – not the heavily spiced biryani but less familiar rice dish – kedgeree. The anticipation of all the rich spices that local chefs will serve has her all enthusiastic – “I’m really excited about tasting their biryanis,” she says.
The Biryani Festival is new to Galle’s already brimming calendar – it is another of Galle Literary Festival founder Geoffrey Dobbs’ innovations and Rachel says she seized the chance when the invitation came, having heard from her mother-in-law Darina Allen about Sri Lanka and GLF in past years.
Dobbs, it turns out, is a cousin of her husband and the Irish connection was another reason to visit, tying it in with a trip to Taipei and Singapore on a promotional tour for BBC World for her TV show ‘All Things Sweet’. In the region, she’s visited India previously, fundraising for the Irish charity ‘Goal’ taking her to Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi.
Eating out and travel for her is wonderfully inspirational, she says, scrolling down her phone screen to show us how the ideas are immediately put down for future reference.
Exotic and unusual flavour combinations are always simmering in her mind and she makes it a point to credit the people and places who provide random sparks of inspiration, stressing that in this business, you have to be transparent.
When she was just 18 and yearning to travel the world, it was to Darina Allen’s cookery school at Ballymaloe House in County Cork that Rachel O’Neill went from Dublin, not really anticipating a career in cooking but rather urged by her parents to learn a skill with which she could support herself while travelling.
Her parents themselves were successful entrepreneurs – her father in the business of manufacturing shoes and her mother, into fashion and design. Rachel did contemplate a career in shoe design but Ballymaloe got in the way. “When I started the course I realised that food was what I wanted to do.”
Ballymaloe had another attraction- Darina’s son Isaac. Rachel did her course, went off to travel, “six months here and six months there”, came back to Ballymaloe -began teaching and took off again. Darina was really patient, she smiles.
“She knew I would be coming back. And when someone goes travelling they come back refreshed and inspired. I started chefing in the restaurant kitchen at Ballymaloe and I realised it was more the teaching that was at the heart of it for me.I loved the teaching, learning – the atmosphere.” Teaching is at the core of it all and what she will doing when the TV part of it, is over.
Her TV show Rachel’s Favourite Food spawned a succession of favourites: Rachel’s Favourite Food for Friends, Rachel’s Favourite Food at Home, then Rachel Allen: Bake! and more. Coming up with new ideas for shows is the easy part because there’s so much- whether cuisines or occasions- types of food that’s not been covered, she feels.
More recently she has indulged in her love for travel by leaving the familiar confines of her home kitchen and going in search of the food she wants to feature. “I prefer going out, meeting these people and seeing how it’s being made. I’m learning then. That’s what I really like,” she says.
‘Coastal Cooking’ which has just wrapped up filming saw Rachel travelling from her home in Cork on the southern tip of Ireland up the southern and western coast right up north.
“We cooked on beaches and cliffs and farms – even went a little inland. So there’s a lot of fish but there’s still the wonderful dairies and soda bread, apiarists making bees’ honey…” It was all great fun, sailing in fishing boats, wading into streams and she wrote a cookbook to go with it. All of her books have gone hand in hand with her TV shows – most having the same name.
“What I’m really interested in is not just the food, but discovering a place, its people, the culture, the countryside,” she says.
She works to a plan. Once the subject for a book is decided -say sweets – she will write down all the flavours she wants to try, perhaps chocolate, toffee, caramel, coconut, spices, make big headings and then dive into each.
The ideas keep poppping in as she wakes up or goes to bed. The recipe testing process has its trials- “sometimes they work out the first time- sometimes the fifth time. Baking is such a science- it’s very precise. So I have lot more disasters,” she says, confessing easily to cakes that have sunk in the middle.
Her three children- sons Joshua, Lucca and daughter Scarlett are her honest and harshest critics and her testing team extends to her husband’s cousin Ivan who helps her out when she’s doing demonstrations.
Husband Isaac meanwhile also handles the business side of the Rachel Allen franchise and it’s a partnership that though not planned, has happily evolved even down to them cooking together.
Celebrity cook and author she may be, but it’s still her favourite part of the day when after work, she gets to relax in her kitchen with him and the children.
A lot of people think Irish food is boiled or overboiled, she says wryly, but there are many traditional recipes – like Irish stew, all quite simple, revolving mainly around meat, she says mentioning Dublin cobble -bacon and sausages boiled in a broth.
Curiously enough she says a dish she had in the night market in Taipei was not dissimilar and making such connections is something she loves.
What Irish food has become now, she feels, is all about the country’s wonderful produce “because we have all that rain, we have amazing green grass- our meat is wonderful –the dairy is also fantastic, and there is all that great seafood.” The ethos at Ballymaloe, she explains, has always been that if you have the best ingredients you really don’t have to do much.
Myrtle Allen, her husband Isaac’s grandmother, now 93, the matriarch who was responsible for opening up Ballymaloe House’s highly regarded restaurant in 1964 (it has now expanded into a flourishing hotel and cookery school- started by Darina), always attributed its success to local produce.
That thinking has hugely influenced her, Rachel believes and she takes pride in the fact that Myrtle was showcasing the producers as heroes long before it became fashionable to do so.
On this brief trip to Sri Lanka there will be much to see and absorb and even on her first morning here, before this interview, breakfast at the Galle Face Hotel has been a feast of new flavours – hoppers, chicken curry and fiery sambols.
Visits to white tea estates and cinnamon plantations await. She is reminded that she has to take back a bundle of cinnamon for Darina. Perhaps too, loads of ideas.