OP: The Joyce of Cooking
Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 1986. Hardcover. Very Good.
“You can always tell a bad novelist by the way he or she deals with eating. ‘After breakfast they resumed their journey.’ But what, for heaven’s sake, did they have for breakfast?” writes Anthony Burgess in his foreword to The Joyce of Cooking (1986). Indeed, that is the question we all might have when left with such a culinary tease.
Alison Armstrong, a scholar who specializes in the works of James Joyce (1882–1941), delights in the abundant references to food in the Irish author’s work.
Drawing from five of Joyce’s books—Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Exiles (1918), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939)—Armstrong pairs recipes with quotes that inspired them.
The “quashed quotatoes, messes of mottage,” of Finnegans Wake, leads to colcannon, champ (a casserole of potatoes, scallions, and nettles), and potato farls (a fried dumpling). A recipe for sea smelt in onion is a clever play on the Ulysses line, “She smelt an onion.” And Dubliners gives us “a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin.”
An excellent Irish cookbook (of which there are still too few) made all the more delightful with its literary flourishes.
Our copy is Near Fine in a Very Good, clipped jacket.
