Michael Byrne, Bloomsday victualler
As Joyceans dust down their boaters ready for Bloomsday, on Friday, a meat lorry from Co Carlow will contain an extra parcel for Michael Byrne. It will be a big week for Sandymount village, in Dublin, and the butcher's biggest week for kidney sales.
In the past Byrne would have to order more than a dozen extra lambs to service the Bloomsday customers who enjoy the traditional kidney breakfast. Now he can order offcuts instead of the whole animal, so he can ask Ballon Meats to pack an extra couple of dozen kidneys. In a normal week he would sell about two or three kidneys a day. Next week he expects to more than double that.
When he began in what was then Ryan's butchers in Sandymount, as a messenger boy, at the age of 14, the shop butchered its own animals. He took over the shop 30 years ago. Bloomsday does not compare with the Christmas or Easter rush, but it marks a peak in orders for the food that gave to Leopold Bloom's palate "a fine tang of faintly scented urine". Does he eat with relish the inner organ himself? "The only time I ever ate kidney was in 1991, at an England-Ireland soccer match when I was with friends and we had two steak-and-kidney pies. I did think, here I am, sitting here eating kidney when I don't eat it from my own shop."
With his typical working day starting before 7am, holidays are Byrne's only times for books. He hasn't read Ulysses, preferring political works. And his recommended recipe for a Bloomsday breakfast? "The kidney is round with a membrane on it, so you take off the membrane, take out the cord in the centre and slice the kidney down the middle. It opens up like a butterfly, with a hole in the middle where the cord was. Then just fry it in butter." Non-purists could add sausages, liver and mushrooms to the pan for the full fried breakfast. "But it's full of cholesterol," Byrne warns. No harm once a year, then.
Interview: Catherine Cleary.