Tributes and anecdotes abound for ‘mother of modern Irish cooking’

So passionate was she about Irish produce, she once carried a heavy suitcase stuffed full of locally grown apples on board a flight to New York where she had been invited to deliver a cookery class.

Just one of the many anecdotes which emerged yesterday from friends of Ballymaloe founder and “the mother of modern Irish cooking”, Myrtle Allen, who died in Cork on Tuesday, aged 94.

Potter Stephen Pearce, who established his Shanagarry pottery brand a few corn and barley fields from Ballymaloe cookery school, recalled how he met Mrs Allen in the departures area of an Irish airport at some stage during the 1980s as they were both about to board a flight for New York.