Kidneys, Livers, and Hearts, Oh My.

I'm trying to write a paper on Joyce, food, and Ulysses right now, so of course I'm procrastinating by returning to a blog I started months ago in a similar fit of procrastination.

But really, check this out:

"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"(Ulysses, 4.1-5).

Awesome. This isn't for the faint of heart, clearly (no pun intended), most Americans balk at the idea of consuming anything that even remotely resembles an identifiable working organ. The meat we do it is rarely on the bone, comes in plastic wrapped packages, and couldn't be more distanced from its origins. Feathers, eyes, heads, feet, tails: we see none of this, all disposed of most neatly by the butcher. We rarely even see a butcher anymore, relying instead on the refrigerated cases at the supermarket, everything neatly prepackaged and bloodfree.

I object. If we're going to eat meat, we should be prepared to face the animals we're eating, and we should eat as much of the animal as we can. In this spirit, I'm going to embark on a bit of a culinary/literary adventure, eating as I read. I happen to have begun in a bit of a tight spot; Leopold Bloom's tastes are not exactly mine. For all my vitriol and blather, I don't eat much meat, and when I do it's usually boneless skinless chicken breasts. The thought of eating pork kidney or veal liver makes my stomach flip upside down. But I have a foodie background: I have worked as a chef and spent countless hours pontificating on how much I hate picky eaters. So hypocrisy begone: veal liver here I come.

To whet your appetite:

Bloom "crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed hungrily against him... Here. 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"(4.274-9).

Mmmm. Delicious.