Bloomsday Breakfast: Mutton Kidney in the Morning

Jo Stougaard/My Last Bite

Fish kidney curry from Jitlada. We bet neither Leo Bloom nor James Joyce ever tried this.

It's 8 a.m., June 16th, 1904, and at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, Leopold Bloom, the wandering hero of Ulysses, is contemplating a breakfast of offal, which we know all about thanks to James Joyce's piquant description:

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.

107 years before Anthony Bourdain, Fergus Henderson et al. lauded sweetbreads, Bloom sat down to his breakfast of champions. WWLBE? Get thee to L.A.'s equivalent of Dublin's Dlugacz, (i.e. your favorite butcher), and have yourself a breakfast fit for an Irish literary icon. Happy Bloomsday.

Note: The one-word constructions are as Joyce wrote them.