The earliest fabric in Ballymaloe House is the remnant of a tower house built around 1450 by the Desmond FitzGerald family, the great Hiberno-Norman dynasty that controlled most of Munster from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The house was particularly associated with Sir John FitzEdmund FitzGerald, a sixteenth-century member of the family who, unusually, navigated the religious and political upheavals of the Reformation and the Desmond Rebellions without losing his lands. The Desmonds eventually lost everything after their failed rebellion against Elizabeth I in the 1580s; the FitzGerald estates were broken up and granted to English planter families. Ballymaloe passed through several hands over the next two centuries. Most of what stands now dates from about 1820, when the house was rebuilt around the surviving castle walls into a Regency country residence. Quiet renovations in 1990 and 2000 modernised the kitchens and guest rooms without disturbing the older fabric. The combined building - medieval bones in a Georgian skin - is unusual in Irish country-house architecture, where most tower houses were either fully demolished or left to ruin.

When the Allens bought Ballymaloe in 1948 they were farmers first. Ivan ran the dairy herd; Myrtle ran the house. By the early 1960s, with their children grown, Myrtle began to think about opening her dining room to paying guests. The era was wrong - Ireland in 1964 had almost no restaurant culture outside Dublin, and the few that existed served what was essentially French food badly copied. Myrtle had different ideas. She would cook what the farm produced: the lamb from her own fields, the salmon from the Blackwater river, the vegetables from the kitchen garden, the cheese and cream from her own dairy. She named the restaurant The Yeats Room, after the poet whose mother had Cork connections. The food was unpretentious, seasonal, recognisably Irish. In 1967 the family began converting upstairs rooms into bedrooms for guests who wanted to stay over after dinner. The hotel grew from there.

In 1974, the Michelin Guide began regularly covering Ireland. In 1975 Ballymaloe House received one Michelin star - the first ever awarded to a chef-owner-farmer in the country. Myrtle Allen was sixty-one years old. She kept the star every year until 1980. From 1981 to 1994 the guide instead awarded Ballymaloe the so-called Red M designation, which Michelin used at the time to indicate exceptional value - good food at a reasonable price. The Egon Ronay Guide, then a serious British arbiter, awarded the restaurant one star in 1975-1981 and again in 1983-1984 and 1987-1988. International food critics began making pilgrimages to Shanagarry. Through it all Myrtle continued to insist that what she was doing was not haute cuisine - it was simply cooking the best ingredients in the simplest way that would let them be tasted. She wrote a cookbook, The Ballymaloe Cookbook, that has remained in print continuously since 1977. She effectively created the genre of Modern Irish cooking, and a generation of younger chefs followed her example.

The Allen family business now spans three generations. Myrtle's daughter-in-law Darina founded the Ballymaloe Cookery School at nearby Kinoith in 1983 and ran it for decades; Darina's daughter-in-law Rachel became a national television cook and food writer; cousins, in-laws and grandchildren run cafés, food shops, the relish business, the bread business. Ballymaloe House itself passed from Myrtle - who died in 2018, aged 94 - to her descendants. As of 2024 the head chef is Dervilla O'Flynn, who is married to Myrtle's grandson Sacha Whelan. Two daughters of Myrtle Allen, Hazel and Wendy, helped run the house and grounds for decades. The Yeats Room still serves dinner most nights, the kitchen still works largely from the Ballymaloe farms and gardens, and the menu still changes daily depending on what comes out of the soil. The shape Myrtle gave the place in 1964 is recognisable today.

Ballymaloe House is one of the more peculiar institutions in Irish hospitality. It is a country-house hotel, but not an expensive one by international standards. It is a serious restaurant, but the dining room is informal and family-friendly. The drawing room has a real fire and old armchairs and books spilling off the side tables, and guests are encouraged to wander rather than reserve a specific space. The grounds include not only the gardens visitors can walk through but also working farmland - cows, sheep, hens, polytunnels - that supply the kitchen. Beyond the gate, the East Cork countryside spreads out toward Ballycotton Bay to the south, the Bride Valley to the north. The brand Ballymaloe is now larger than the house - there are Ballymaloe Country Relish jars on supermarket shelves across Ireland and Britain - but the original building, with its Norman walls and its Georgian face and its Allen-family kitchen, remains the centre of everything.