Customer Reviews

JOYCE OF COOKING

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a great book both as a simple cookbook (best oxtail soup recipe I've found) and just for fun. It takes the dishes mentioned in ULYSSES and gives recipes as well as putting them in the context of the book. Most of the recipes are period; no microwaves here. But I'm no great cook, and I've found that I can do just fine with most of the recipes, though many are too time-consuming for everyday use. But for special occasions, the recipes are wonderful to actually use and the rest of the time the book provides a historical reference and insight into Joyce's masterpiece.

But this book doesn't work on either level. As a cookbook the recipes are only half there, sometimes woefully flawed. You can tell this within the second recipe for marzipan violets, the ratios are off and the directions are horribly inadequate. Also, as a reviewer below noted, most of these recipes have quotes tacked on that seem arbitrary at best. I gave it two stars because it's fun to flip through, and for some people it's probably used like a coffe table book of abstract art, there to impress others as a signpost of taste. For the rest of us, save your money for other books and find the recipes elsewhere.

For a lover of literature and food, for a lover of Joyce, and for lovers in general, this book will delight... it is the most unusual, pleasurable cookbook I use, and there is none that rivals its title (except one)? It deserves to be set right next to the more well known "Joy..." on any kitchen shelf. It's an amazing gift for literary friends, and I have found that most people don't know about it. Every recipe is accompanied by a quote from Joyce where the food is mentioned in one of his novels or short stories. My copy has lovely kitchen stains all through it--as I have made so many things many times. My favorite is the delicious "Molly's Seed Cake" the ultimate psychological and culinary dessert. The recipes were lovingly researched, interviewing all over Ireland, and the author loves the work of James Joyce. A treasure. Every time I make anything in this book I have to get it out and pass it around the table. Truly a Joy(ce)!

This is a lovely book and personally I truly enjoy any such cookery book with a literary twist. Why on earth must some people feel duty bound to make political statements at the drop of the proverbial hat? Get off your soap box. This is a cookbook for lord sake and I'm fairly sure that Mr. Joyce did eat from time to time and benefited from it. Personally, I thought the idea was to learn more of traditional Irish fare whilst also getting a taste of James Joyce's works. Therefore, if this publication should inspire one to read more Joyce, then are we not all the better for having purchased the cookbook in the first place?

Not even ironic

This book collects a number of mainstream dishes and pats a quote and a title from Joyce on it like basil butter.

Readers of Joyce will remember Lenehan's plate of grocer's peas and vinegar from Dubliner's Two Gallants, or that collection's stir-about in The Sisters, or A Painful Case's corned beef and cabbage. But mostly the hunger inherited from the British stealing every scrap of food in Ireland, creating an artificial famine in the mid-1800's (during which time plenty of food was exported from Ireland to England: see the relevant histories here of which I have several) whose memory still held people from eating in peace and in the luxury described within this horrific book. People were kept too damned poor, and held further from the alleged sin of gluttony by a very oppressive church, believing an unfamiliarly full stomach must be a sin and a satanic possession.

Better the Joyce scholar read the several excellent commentaries on Joyce regarding the colonialist nature of Ireland under British oppression, including the Semi-colonialist Joyce, etc., etc. A good deal of Ulysses in fact is devoted to the cattle "trade" undergoing British imperialist piracy. Cattle were slaughtered by the British throughout Ireland in the name of battling "hoof and mouth disease" without any discernable symptoms (as Joyce directly states in Ulysses' Episode now called Cyclops), in order to maintain high market prices due to scarcity in London. Constantly in the travels walking around Dublin we see herds of cattle being marched off to British ships while the people of Ireland starve. And the hero of the novel, Mr. Bloom, a relatively well-off man, is left the inner organs only to eat in Ireland, the offal. The best he can find for breakfast is a pig's kidney.

Joyce himself was no gourmand but was noted at meals, literary and otherwise, for staring at his food without eating, remembering his family and friends at home starving hopelessly, much as his fellow Irishman and his student/secretary Samuel Beckett also did. In fact it is interesting that Bloom's lunch of Burgundy with a reeking thin sliced Gorganzola sandwich reappears so prominently in Beckett's Dante and the Lobster, with gas lamp burned toast.

In short, this book is as absurdly a blasphemy and a misrepresentation of the author's work as would be the Beckett of Cooking. What? Chicken bones cast aside and fought over by Lucky and Estragon?

I received a copy years ago (a necessary comment for those readers of reviews who do not believe I possess and read the books I review) without this dustcover of vegetable matter I am certain would be unidentifiable to Mr. Joyce, let alone myself.

Hard to imagine a market for this book. But look at its used price, very low. Get instead another copy of Ulysses (the Gabler edition of famously fragile spine) or commentaries (I am enjoying Rickard's right now and awaiting Joyce's Revenge, while replaying constantly the excellent, or as good as can be expected, Donal Donnelly UNABRIDGED recording of Gabler).

By the way, Bloom's dinner that night was a cup of instant cocoa, with a supper of other inner organs.

For a cookbook, please get Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles bistro book instead. You'll enjoy it so much more than this odd hybrid cookbook which shamelessly steals from the starving Mr. Joyce (a metonymy of the cultural imperialism which killed Irish history, commerce and civilization) and be able to cook something out of it as well.

Meanwhile hear constantly that Cyclops episode for comprehension.