Ginger cordial

In Lotus Eaters Bloom has thought of ginger ale as a "temperance beverage," marketed to people who want to avoid drinking. His "Ginger cordial," made from ginger root, lemon peels, water, some form of sugar, and an acidic preservative, is a concentrated syrup rather than a carbonated soft drink, but it too probably contains little alcohol. Gifford remarks that it was "Widely advertised as a temperance drink."

Ginger ale, which had become hugely popular by 1904 owing to the business founded by Irish doctor Thomas Joseph Cantrell in the 1850s, no doubt contained some alcohol from the fermentation process, but the amount could be tightly controlled. Some ginger cordials added alcohol in the form of brandy or pure spirits: the "King's Ginger," created in 1903 for the heavy-drinking King George VII, contained quite a lot. But it seems likely that Bloom orders a bottle because he knows that, like ginger ale, it will leave his head clear. In Cyclops he has strenuously resisted calls to come have a drink, "Bloom saying he wouldn't and he couldn't and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well he'd just take a cigar."

The notion that Bloom is ordering something relatively nonalcoholic is supported by the following sentence: "Chase me, the cabby's caudle." Cabbies drinking on the job endangered public health, and cabman's shelters erected in the final decades of the 19th century offered food and warm drinks but no alcohol. Perhaps some of these shelters offered caudles, which were warm sweet drinks normally whipped up for invalids and postpartum mothers. Caudles contained wine or ale but it was diluted with other ingredients to make a brew regarded as healthful. In earlier eras they had often contained a lot of milk and eggs, like an eggnog, but by Victorian times the chief ingredient seems to have been an oatmeal gruel augmented with sugar and spices. The 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910) calls the caudle "a drink of warm gruel, mixed with spice and wine, formerly given to women in childbed."

The medical students in the bar would be aware of this drink's history in treating postpartum weakness, so it may be one of them who is speaking. He seems to imply that Bloom is not avoiding alcohol altogether, but indulging in the way a frail woman would. When Stephen declares, a couple of sentences later, that he will be drinking "Absinthe"—strongly alcoholic, hallucinogenic, and deranging—someone says, "Caramba! Have an eggnog or a prairie oyster." This already inebriated man needs to tone it down, in other words, while Bloom needs to man up.

The reputed health benefits of cordials and caudles clearly lie behind someone's statement that Bloom has ordered a drink to "Stimulate the caloric." Many Victorians believed that an invisible, intangible fluid called "caloric" was responsible for dispersing heat. Not yet fully aware of molecular motion (Brownian motion was first observed in 1827, but it took a century for theorists to adequately explain it), many in the 19th century followed Antoine Lavoisier in supposing that heat was "an exquisitely elastic fluid" that flowed from warmer objects to cooler ones.

Someone is drawing on this theory to suggest that ginger cordials have healthful effects in the human body. The medical student who has derided Bloom's "caudle" may still be talking here, mocking a tired old claim about promoting bodily heat. But it is equally possible that Bloom, hearing his choice of drink mocked, is responding in his usual half-informed scientistic manner: Weak drink? No, I am engaged in a thinking man's effort to optimize my bodily fluids. This kind of flimsy self-justification in the face of social ridicule becomes a prominent theme in Circe.