Forgotten Skills of Cooking

Darina Allen is Ireland's best-known food ambassador and the bestselling author of Ballymaloe Cookery Course and Forgotten Skills of Cooking, which won the prestigious André Simon award in 2009. She campaigns for local produce, is a member of Slow Food Ireland and set up Ireland's first farmers' market. She has won many awards including the Guild of Food Writers' Lifetime Achievement award in 2013. www.cookingisfun.ie

Processed and convenience foods and shortcut cooking methods have become so entrenched in our culinary culture, it's easy to forget just how much we have forgotten about real cooking. But cooking instructor Darina Allen knows all too well. More and more of her students arrive having never cooked so much as an egg, or needing lessons in remedial onion chopping. She remembers one student who thought she'd ruined a bowl of heavy cream because she'd whipped it too much. She thought the clumps and clots in the bowl meant it was bad. "I said, 'Stop! Don't throw it out!' " says Allen, author of Forgotten Skills of Cooking. "I said, 'You've made butter!' She was completely fascinated." -- Michele Kayal Associated Press, 7/3/2014