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.

 

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.