Darina Allen:?'it's about lifestyle and thrift and joy...'

It's Friday afternoon of week 11 of the 12-week certificate course at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Shanagarry, Co Cork, and Darina Allen is mid-demonstration. She's been telling the students that she likes to think that the lobsters imagine that it's a hot day on Ballycotton beach, and that they are nodding off in the sun as the heat rises.

"If there's any justice," she says, dangling a lobster over a pot of water being brought slowly to the boil, "I'll come back in the next life as one of these, and have to listen to some cookery teacher banging on about how it's not going to hurt..."

The pace is quite something. Allen has already demonstrated a lamb tagine, a couple of heart-stopping cakes from the 'if-in-doubt-add-a-pound-of-butter-and-a-pint-of-cream' school of baking and several variations on the scallop. All around the room students are flagging. Pretty blondes in crocs and chequerboard trousers and bankers spending their redundancy money acquiring some life skills nod off against the radiators.

I've been at Ballymaloe, following Allen around, for a few hours and she's barely paused to draw breath. I've seen a bit of the 100-acre organic farm and admired the pigs. I've been introduced to one of the three flocks of hens that they keep - the rare breeds who hang out at the Palais des Poulets.

"Hens with attitude," says Allen. "The fancier they look, the less they lay."

On a whistle-stop tour of the school, she's re-positioned a loaf cooling in the wrong position, picked up a stray coffee cup, quizzed a student as to whether she's emailed a potential employer, worried about the temperature in the shop, told some of the staff about an amazing non-toxic oven cleaner that she picked up at a trade show in London and paused to chat with one of her six grandchildren, Amelia Peggy, the daughter of her eldest daughter, Lydia. At 61, Allen looks younger and less schoolmarm-ish than she used to – gone are the frumpy clothes and thick glasses of her early television appearances, replaced by a chic grey bob, Miu-Miu glasses and Converse All Stars. She's also funnier and less earnest than you might expect.

By the time we sit down in the kitchen of her house, on the cookery school campus, to coffee served in warmed cups with a choice of hot or cold milk and some squares of the prettiest coconut biscuits, I'm exhausted. Allen, however, is only getting started.

"We set up the cookery school as an alternative farming enterprise," she says. "We wanted to find a way to earn a living in the place and on the land that we love and the cookery school came out of not wanting to have to commute in and out of Cork each day. The big challenge of living in the country is to find a way of earning a living so that you can hang on to what you have. We all love the country and country ways and now the school and farm employ 40 or 50 local people, and a network of small artisan producers has grown up around us, so it makes a big contribution to the local economy.

"Plus the presence of the students – they tend to be young and attractive – draws a lot of people into the local pubs…"

Allen grew up in a large, comfortably off family in Cullahill, Co Laois (the O'Connells had the shop, the post office, the undertakers, the drapery and so on). They kept hens and grew vegetables; her mother sewed and made clothes and took pride in preparing delicious meals for her family each day, insisting on the table being laid properly and woe betide them if the butter was still in its packet.

Allen first came to Ballymaloe in the late '60s as a young graduate of the hotel-management course on Cathal Brugha Street.

"At that time, men were chefs and it was very difficult for women to get into the top kitchens. There were only a few – Russells, Jammets and so on. Women ran tea shops. I really wanted to cook properly. I wanted to learn to do soufflés and patés and homemade ice cream and use fresh herbs. At college they taught us faithfully how to do everything from scratch, to make breads and so on. But then they said 'Now when you're out in the world it won't be like this, you might buy in some of it frozen…'

"I was really wondering about that… and I began to realise that everything that I had taken for granted at home, the lovely home-cooked food, was actually very good. I couldn't understand why there were home foods and restaurant foods and why things that were acceptable in one were not okay for the other. Then someone told me that there was a farmer's wife down in Cork who had opened a restaurant in her own house, miles from anywhere, that they had their own pigs and dairy herd and that they wrote the menu from scratch every day depending on what fish came in at Ballycotton and what vegetables were ready in the garden. That would have been considered frightfully amateurish but I thought it sounded exactly what I was looking for. So I wrote to Myrtle Allen and got back a lovely letter saying that they'd love to have me and that they would pay me £4.50 per week..."

The rest, as they say, is history. She fell for Tim Allen, Myrtle's son, and was the first in a long line of visitors to Ballymaloe who never left. Raised a Catholic, Allen recently became a Quaker like her in-laws.

"I'm not particularly religious but I am spiritual. I always enjoyed going to Quaker meetings and admired the Quaker ethos that I had married into. A couple of years ago I thought that I should get off the fence. As with everything else Quaker there wasn't a huge big fuss, a couple of the Quaker elders came out and talked to me for several hours to explore why I wanted to convert and they went off and thought about it and decided that I was in the right frame of mind… There was no ceremony, because they don't do ceremonies."

Ballymaloe is often viewed as one big operation, when in fact the various branches of the Allen family each run separate businesses, most of them food-related. Ballymaloe House, a couple of miles down the road from the cookery school, is overseen by Myrtle Allen, still sharp as a tack, along with her son Rory and his wife, Hazel, aided by some of their children.

Darina and Tim's four children – Isaac, who is married to Rachel Allen (a former student of Darina's at the cookery school and another one who fell under the Ballymaloe spell and never went home), Toby, Lydia and Emily – all live within a 15-minute drive and are involved in one way or another in the various Ballymaloe enterprises. Toby and his Scottish wife help with the cookery school and run the shop; Lydia and her English husband are organic farmers who set up the Mahon Point farmers' market. Emily's partner is a German butcher who teaches some of the 'forgotten-skills' courses in the school and operates a weekend pizza restaurant on the premises.

Everyone helps on the farms; other relations look after the shop at Ballymaloe House and the function spaces there, and produce the Ballymaloe relish and the Cully & Sully range of soups and stews. "We all work jolly hard. We feel very fortunate to live in the country. I love travel and cities, but I love getting home. For me it's not about having heaps of money, or a house in the Caribbean, but about having a reasonable lifestyle, with enough money to have the odd little holiday..."

Allen's latest project is her new book – Forgotten Skills of Cooking – The Time Honoured Ways are the Best. It's no surprise to hear that, written long-hand with the assistance of three secretaries to type it up, it took her four years to complete, and has ended up twice the size and a year later than originally intended – it's a massive door-stopper of a tome, with over 700 recipes. It's also very of the moment – with a nostalgia factor that will appeal to older people, yet also catering to the lost generation who have missed out on all the food and skills knowledge that would previously have been handed down.

"I think," says Allen, "that this year the penny has really dropped. Everyone sees the value of an element of self-sufficiency. Bling is over, it's totally unfashionable. At dinner parties now, people boast about how little things have cost, how much they have saved... A few weeks ago I took a famous wine writer who was visiting over to a friend's house for dinner. He's a very good cook. Eight of us ate really well – the meat had cost €11 because he used shin of beef to make the most amazing gutsy stew with lovely fluffy mashed potato.

"The whole skill of thrifty housekeeping has been lost. People knew how to slap a steak or a chop on to the pan, but they didn't know what to do with the cheaper cuts of meat. In the book, there's an emphasis too on not wasting, on using leftovers in a delicious way."

The book also answers the questions that people have been asking Allen for years. How do you pluck a pheasant? Skin a rabbit? Fillet a fish? Make butter, yoghurt and cheese? It covers the basics of how to cure a pig in a day, keep bees, build a smoker and raise chickens.

"In some families there are three generations who haven't seen their mothers cooking in the kitchen. I'm from the first generation where women really went to university, and the message from many parents and career-guidance people was to concentrate on your career, and 'Why would you be bothered learning to cook? Or grow something? You're never going to need any of that'. The message was that the skill of home-making and house- keeping was of lesser value and importance, demeaning even, and that you could pick it up later on if you felt like it.

"That was hunky dory while things were going well but what we see now is wonderful young people, who are so competent and confident in so many ways, but have concentrated on a rather narrow set of academic skills and now have no life skills, no coping skills for a different world... Plus Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall have made it cool, and so our students have started to ask more and more about making their own bacon and sausages, foraging and preserving."

Concerned about impending food shortages – the chief scientist to the UK Department of Agriculture predicts that these are only 10 years away – Allen is big on self-sufficiency.

"Everyone, even people living on suburban housing estates, should have a couple of hens and a few vegetables. It all sounds very worthy, but it's about lifestyle and thrift and joy... During the last few decades we threw the baby out with bath water. As soon as people could afford to buy their vegetables they stopped growing them. It smacked of the bad old times; people wouldn't grow in case the neighbours might think they couldn't afford to go to the supermarket. Once people start, they realise that it's not just about being less expensive, but about how much more delicious everything is when you put the effort in yourself. In the summer, we regularly sit down to a meal when everything on our plates has been produced on the farm or by our neighbours. And for groups of people to develop self-sufficiency, help each other with the digging and grow different things to barter turns it into a social and community activity."

As part of the East Cork Slow Food education project, Allen leads an initiative with local schools, whereby families are given hens to raise and children are taught the basics of growing and cooking. There is a waiting list of schools wanting to sign up. She also heads up the Slow Food Movement in Ireland and the Artisan Food Forum, battling on behalf of small producers against over-regulation.

"Government agencies should be working to support and encourage, not just to police. There is no longer any brief to educate – years ago there were poultry instructresses and the like, now the only person who comes in to your farm or business is someone who has the power to close you down."

Back at the cookery school, the students are serving lunch. It's very good – there's no stinting on the quality of ingredients, no catering packs of chicken fillets, even though some of the students may never have picked up a wooden spoon before they arrived at Ballymaloe. All the experimenting is done on wonderful organic Ahern's birds from down the road in Midleton.

Later that evening Maria from Korea, a graduating student, cooks a farewell dinner in Darina and Tim's house for a group of friends and family. I'm surprised to be included, but charmed by the relaxed hospitality. The Ballymaloe magic is alive and well.