MORAL PUB GRUB

'Cheese is a mity elf,

Digesting all things but itself.'

Folk rhyme, apparently.

 

 

I remember, when I started, or started trying, to read Joyce’s Ulysses, when I was about 16 years old.  Much of it went over my head, as I suppose much of it still does, but I was all fired up by the scene in the ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter when Leopold Bloom goes to Davy Byrne’s (the apostrophe seems to come and go) pub for lunch. This is a heavily edited version of the part that did the firing.

—Have you a cheese sandwich?

—Yes, sir.

A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?

—Yes, sir.

Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. 

—Mustard, sir?

—Thank you.

He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. 

 

I was a cheese lover from a very early age, and my parents were moderately indulgent in buying me moderately exotic cheeses. I’d never eaten gorgonzola at the time I read that bit of Joyce, though I knew what it was, and I’d definitely tasted Danish blue. My grandma told me it had worms in it, which I doubted even at the time.

But reading that passage in Ulysses, I was confused by the reference to mustard.  Who puts mustard on a cheese sandwich?  A great many people, no doubt, but it was news to me, and still doesn’t strike me as a good idea.

 

         Anyway, being in Dublin last week, off we went (Anthony, Caroline and me), to Davy Byrnes, now definitely without an asterisk and styling itself a gastropub. The “Classic Gorgonzola €13.00 Classic Gorgonzola and brown bread served all day (pair with a glass of Pinot Noir for €20)”is still on the menu, and apparently it looks like this, 

 

Very appetizing though not as I ever imagined.  It’s an open-face sandwich I suppose, but it would be hard to cut it into strips.

 

We didn’t order that. Instead we had Connemara oysters, 

Davy Byrnes photos by Caroline Gannon

Cod Croquettes - yep I'm still on my croquette kick

and Sneem Black Pudding with ‘Charred tomatoes, apple chutney, Lyonnaise onions and Guinness brown bread.’  I might have wished for apple rather than the tomato which actually appeared totally uncharred, but let’s not quibble. 

       It was all very good indeed – and the place was full of Joyce memorabilia, and the staff were great, not least the owner - Bill Dempsey, I believe - who was very chatty and charming, and it was karaoke night, though fortunately that was happening way down the other end of the room.

 

       And other things about Dublin …  Now, I am not the world’s greatest drinker of Guinness – I drink about a pint of it per year. So during my time in Dublin I probably had a decade’s worth.  There is, apparently, much discussion about where the best pint of Guinness is to be, and The Gravediggers, adjacent to the Glasnevin Cemetery, is high in the list of contenders.  

As a non-connoisseur I might be inclined to think that all Guinness tastes pretty much the same, but no, the one I drank at The Gravediggers was very superior indeed. VERY superior.

 

BY THE BOOK

I can’t remember exactly when I first made an attempt to read Ulysses; but it was somewhere between starting to drink illegally in pubs and being able to drink legally in pubs.  And I was fascinated by the Lestryogonians section where Bloom eats a gorgonzola sandwich accompanied by a glass of Burgundy.

‘Mr. Bloom ate his stripes of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate.  Not logwood that.  Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off’ 

I wasn’t sure about the mustard with gorgonzola, or with cheese in general, but I know some people like that that kind of thing.

That passage in Ulysses cheered me up no end. I was already a bookish lad, and I thought. ‘This is great. This is what my life could be about: reading books and thinking about food.’  

At much the same time as I tackled Ulysses, I started to read Samuel Beckett’s novels, though somehow I missed, or at least had forgotten till I reread it a couple of weeks back, this passage in Murphy (1938).

‘She (Celia) entered the saloon bar of a Chef and Brewer and had a sandwich of prawn and tomato and a dock glass of white port off the zinc.’

I’ve had white port once or twice, though not off the zinc, and I know it wasn’t Borges brand, though for literary reasons I wish it had been.

It’s hard to think of white port without thinking of the song ‘White Port and Lemon Juice,’ or ‘WPLJ” originally by the 4 Deuces, then given some fame by Frank Zappa.

I don’t know if the Four Deuces ate a sandwich with their white port and lemon juice; I suspect not.

Then just the other day I was thumbing through a reprint of The Artistry of Mixing Drinks by Frank Meir of the Ritz bar in Paris (1934), and remembered it contained a poem by J. Ainsworth Th. Morgan titled ‘Ode to the Ritz Bar’ which contains these lines

‘The noise of liquor, ice and shake;

A kingly mixing knack,

A sandwich, almond or a chip, 

Then ‘bottoms-up” and “Smack.”! 

Of course we don’t know what cocktail our poet was thinking of, and we know there are such things as ‘cocktail sandwiches’ but it seems to me there aren’t many cocktails that go very well with a sandwich, and vice versa.

SOME LITERARY KIDNEYS

Even if you know next to nothing about Joyce’s Ulysses there’s a chance you may know the lines, “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

To which a reader might ask, “Yes, but what about the external organs?”  Although I suppose (unless we’re discussing testicles) there’s only really one seriously edible external organ and that’s the skin.

Given the flexibility of Bloom’s Jewishness, chances are he wouldn’t have objected too much to eating pork skin.  And even, perhaps especially, observant Jews  are fans of gribenes, chicken or goose skin cracklings.

Anyway, this Joycean literary allusion was in my mind as I made devilled (not grilled) kidneys for Sunday breakfast, loosely following a Fergus Henderson recipe, substituting sherry for chicken stock.  Came out pretty well, I thought.

Had I been cooking them for dinner I would almost certainly have added brandy and made kidneys flambé, but that always brings up another literary allusion: Peter Handke’s The Ride Across Lake Constance.   

I had certainly tasted kidneys before I saw a production of the play, though I’d never had them flambéed.  And now I can never even think of them without summoning up these lines:

Oh and I just found this.  It’s from the Observer, April 2009, and appears in Tom Adams’ interview with Claire Walsh, JG Ballard’s very longtime girlfriend, conducted “just days after his death.”  Was there a rush?

Anyway, Adams writes, “Up until recently, in weeks when his appetite was buoyed by steroid, he (Ballard) would take her up the road to Kristof’s, a regular haunt, and insist she had oysters while he had his favorite devilled kidneys.”  This makes me like Ballard even more than I did already.