40 Years of The Blue Book

In 2014 Ireland’s premier association of country houses, historic hotels and restaurants, The Blue Book, will celebrate 40 years since its foundation. Gillian Nelis talks to founder member Myrtle Allen and incoming president, Catherine Dundon, about the association and its enduring success

"Ants? Ants did you say? In a jar? Well, we can be thankful for that at least." Over dinner in the restaurant at Ballymaloe House, Myrtle Allen is questioning me closely about one of the dishes served up to customers at Claridges in London last year by Rene Redzepi of the Danish restaurant Noma -- cabbage leaves dressed with creme fraiche that came served in a kilner jar and topped with live ants.

At nearly 90, the first lady of Irish hospitality remains as curious and engaging as ever. We are meeting to discuss her involvement with The Blue Book, the association of country houses and manors that celebrates its 40th birthday this year.

Ballymaloe, which at the time was run by Allen and her late husband Ivan, was one of the original members, as were a small number of properties who remain members today, among them Cashel House in Connemara, Longueville in Cork, Hunter's Hotel in Wicklow and Currarevagh House overlooking Lough Corrib.

For Allen, who was present at the meeting where the association was set up, the main attraction was the chance to meet other like-minded people. "I remember being very pleased when I got the invitation because I felt it was very much needed," she says. "I was so pleased to meet other people doing the same thing. At the time what we were doing in Ballymaloe was very unusual, so I jumped at the chance of joining."

The next morning, over tea and scones in the conservatory, Allen is discussing the ups and downs involved in running a country house hotel with Catherine Dundon, who takes over as president of the Blue Book this month. Like the Allens, the Dundons run a family business -- Dunbrody House in Wexford, which includes 22 bedrooms, a cookery school where Dundon's husband, the well-known chef Kevin Dundon teaches a range of courses, a spa and a newly-opened pub.

The Dundons opened Dunbrody to guests in 1997, having acquired the property, which dates from 1830, from the Chicester family. Prior to that, Kevin Dundon was executive chef at the Shelbourne hotel in Dublin, but the pair had long held ambitions to open their own business.

"Kevin was always looking in estate agent's windows on his way home from work, hoping to spot the right place. We looked at properties all along the east coast -- the location was important, because we wanted somewhere that could be open all year; we didn't want to have to close for five months every year, which we realistically would have had to do if we had bought somewhere in the west," she says.

"When we walked into Dunbrody, even though the decor was very drab, we instantly got a very warm feeling. It's a very relaxing house; it's not the kind of place where you feel you have to sit up straight. It was a good fit for us, and for what we wanted to do."

The history of Ballymaloe goes back quite a way further, to around 1450, when a Norman castle was built on land near present-day Shanagarry by a branch of the Fitzgerald family, the illegitimate descendants of the Knights of Kerry. It was acquired by Ivan and Myrtle Allen in 1948, but it wasn't until 1964 that the couple opened their dining room as a restaurant known as The Yeats Room.

While Myrtle Allen's philosophy of using local produce and changing her menus to reflect what was in season and available has become second nature to many of today's chefs, at the time it was revolutionary.  "When we opened I did all the cooking myself, because I knew exactly what I wanted to do," Allen says. "My philosophy was 'what's at hand, what's good, what's fresh, and what do I know how to cook?' At the time that wasn't the norm, so it took a little while for us to get busy. In the early days there would always be great excitement when people would book."

From Monkstown in Cork, Myrtle Allen met her future husband, who was originally from Drogheda in Co Louth, when she returned to Ireland from an English boarding school following the outbreak of World War II. "The man who was living in this house at the time had a daughter my age who was at Newtown school in Waterford, and he was very impressed with it, so my father decided to send me there," she says.

"I arrived in the middle of the night off the train from Cork, and they showed me to a room where three other girls were sleeping. When I told them I was from Cork they asked me if I knew Ivan, who was on the school committee -- they told me he was 'rare'. I'd never heard that expression before, so I was looking forward to meeting him!"

The Allens raised six children in Ballymaloe; at Dunbrody, Catherine and Kevin Dundon's three children are growing up in a house their parents built within a few hundred metres of the hotel. For both women, rearing a family while at the same time operating a business from the family home presented its own challenges.

"We used to live in the hotel," says Catherine Dundon. "With one child that was fine, with two it was less than fine but still doable, but by the time our youngest came along, as well the dogs, fish and all the other stuff that kids bring with them, it just wasn't workable any more.

"Now we're still there, but at least when I'm not actually in Dunbrody, I am actually off. But it's still very much a seven day a week job. Some of those days might only involve a couple of hours work, but it's never going to be five days a week. You're always on call if there's a problem."

Myrtle Allen agrees. "For me it was a little bit easier, because by the time we opened the restaurant, the children weren't tiny tots. But if you're in a house like this, you're always in work."

And of course, buying and running a country house involves money -- sometimes substantial amounts of it. Catherine Dundon describes the acquisition of Dunbrody as a "massive" financial commitment. "A few years after we bought the house, we had to put on a new roof. But when you have a property like this, you do what you have to do," she says.

"What was great about Dunbrody was that it hadn't been touched at all in a structural sense, so you still had very definite front of house and back of house areas. That made it much easier to run it as a small hotel -- the layout was essentially ready for us -- so we tried to do as little as possible in terms of changing the structure."

Ballymaloe was in good condition when the Allens acquired it, but again, substantial investment was needed over the years. Having a realistic idea of just what it costs to keep a country house running is, according to Myrtle Allen, crucial for anyone thinking of running one as a business. "If you have a big house, it's going to be expensive to keep up. There's just no way around it," she says.

Keeping things simple, whether that's the food or the decor, is also important, she believes.

"Look around and see what the products of the area around you are, and then think about menus -- don't do it the other way around," she says. "I based my menu on the food that we were growing ourselves, and that's always how it has been. There's no point in doing anything else really -- if you live in a food-producing area, or on a farm, there's no point in trying to do Italian cuisine. Why would you bother?"

Gillian Nelis is Managing Editor of the Sunday Business Post, where this article first appeared, and a member of the Irish Food Writers’ Guild.

www.ballymaloe.ie, www.dunbrodyhouse.com