IN 1968  when Alice Waters had just graduated from Berkeley, when Paula Wolfert was studying couscous in Tangier, when Diana Kennedy was writing recipes after years of research in Mexico  another young woman, this one from the Irish Midlands, went to work at a peculiar new restaurant on the southern coast of County Cork.

“I had heard that there was a farmer’s wife running a restaurant in her house, serving Irish food and writing the menu every day depending on what was in the garden,” said the woman, Darina O’Connell Allen. “You can’t imagine how revolutionary all of that was at the time.”

None of these women knew it, but they would all pursue the same radical culinary goals: to break the stranglehold of French haute cuisine in the English-speaking world; to cook seasonal food, grown sustainably; to cook with respect for traditional home cooks and simple, excellent dishes.

“It had to happen, the return to cooking,” said Myrtle Allen, the “farmer’s wife” who took on Ms. Allen at Ballymaloe House and later became her mother-in-law. “People don’t just throw away an entire food culture after centuries.”