The Careless Cook 3

“Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He like thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, livers slices 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.” So begins the fourth chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I am almost certain that I have tasted none of Bloom’s favorites, though once in England I ordered a pie that contained kidney. I did not finish the dish once I discovered to my horror my error. None of Bloom’s favored repasts interests me in the least..

I have been vegetarian for almost forty years now. I remember my last cheeseburger. I was on a bike trip with an acquaintance and crossing Massachusetts from Concord to Greenfield we stopped in Northampton, Massachusetts for lunch. A substantial portion of fries accompanied the large and juicy burger. I think this occasion might also have been the last time I drank soda pop: I ordered a Coca-Cola. 

            I have experienced a troubled relationship with flesh on the table. My parents kept a (mostly) kosher home. At some point my depressed mother did keep a supply of Swanson chicken pot pies in the downstairs freezer away from my father’s gaze, though I can’t imagine he didn’t suspect their presence or their place on his children’s menu. Our meat was regularly delivered by the butcher- husband of my mother’s oldest friend, and the standing command given to him by my mother was to trim the fat carefully and completely. We were at the table then instructed to cut away whatever fat remained. When we dined out I subsequently always found the meat too gristly, too fatty, too unsavory. As for fish: though at home we regularly ate Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, in the restaurants my parents always wondered if the fish I had ordered tasted too fishy. I thought the fish always tasted too fishy; again, eating remained fraught with anxiety. 

            I took to eating pasta and pizza. 

            And then I read Frances Moore Lappe’s book Diet for a Small Planet, and I found an ecological and humanitarian justification not to eat meat. Thoreau had written, “A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.” I agreed. And living in New York City where green grocers heavily dotted the streets made vegetarian cooking accessible and adventurous. There was on display fresh produce beautifully arranged the existence of which I had never heard. Eating became a discovered pleasure: it was all vegetables and I did not have to be concerned with too much fat on various cuts of meat or a too fishy taste of fish filets. For years I then steamed an assortment of vegetables and served them over brown rice and covered them all with a variety of sauces. Eating seemed a relatively humble and healthful activity, but I did not ask where these vegetables had been grown and by whom they had been harvested. “Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick, if you do,” Thoreau warned. I do remember boycotting lettuce and grapes, but there was exploitation staring up at me from my plates. 

But I learned how to prepare and cook my vegetarian fare, and I did not experience any worry or suffer too much guilt concerning any of my prepared dishes or my carelessness in preparation. Despite warnings of e coli bacterium in my greens and of protein insufficiency in my non-meat diet; and almost deaf to the outcry against exploitation in the fields, I did not pay enough attention, but from my efforts in the kitchen I remained healthy, vegetarian and careless in my purchases and menus. I had few qualms about the edibility of the dishes placed on my table or of the health of this eater. Sometimes I didn’t even mind the clean-up.

            I wonder how Leopold Bloom prepared the inner organs of beast and fowls. I recently watched a video of the culinary preparation of beef heart but I don’t have a sense that this type of effort would have been a part of Bloom’s techniques in the kitchen. I also don’t have a sense that he ate out in restaurants with his wife, Molly, and his daughter, Milly and ordered this type of fare. In chapter four of Ulysses Bloom does visit the local meat shoppe and purchases a kidney that he placed in the side pocket of his jacket. There he also ogles the girl who had purchased some sausage and whom he lasciviously follows down the street a ways. “To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams.” For lunch that day (June 16, 1904), Bloom purchased a cheese sandwich. No, I do not believe that this most famous protagonist of this most renowned novel in the English language, Leopold Bloom, was a gourmet cook! But perhaps he was a careless one.