Literary Grubs #1 - Bloom's Breakfast

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

            Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray.”

(Calypso from “Ulysses”, James Joyce, 1922)

There is joy in the mundane. The grit nuggets of the just woken eyes. The huff of night-old farts. The dozy, distant clink of teaspoons, mugs. The whistle of the kettle. The cuffing of a partner’s footpads over the carpet.

I had always felt that this – the simple sensuality of the bread and butter – this, above any creed, is what shapes lives, gives meaning.

When I first read Ulysses it was pottering, gobbling, pocketing, guzzling, mucky, naughty, fallible Leopold Bloom with whom I identified. I still do, and in particular I enjoy the celebration of everyday processes, the fuzzy filtering into the day ahead, and the smutty, workaday meatiness of Bloom’s morning routine in the Calypso episode.

Here is his breakfast which I cooked this morning:

1.

"He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages, polonies, black and white ... The shiny links packed with forcemeat fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pig's blood."

2.

"A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last."

3.

"He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He sprinkled it through his fingers, ringwise, from the chipped eggcup."

4.

"He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over..."

5.

"Pungent smoke shot up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back. Only a little burned. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it."

6.

"Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf. He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread, sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth."