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.
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