What is Plumtree's Potted Meat in Ulysses?
Plumtree's Potted Meat is a tinned meat product whose advert Bloom reads in the Freeman's Journal in Episode 5. The slogan, “What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete”, becomes a joke about his own home: that afternoon Boylan visits Molly, and leaves the empty tin.
Edited by Aidan O'Leary · Last updated 30 October 2026
Where it appears
Several episodes. Bloom, idly reading the paper in Lotus Eaters.
What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss.
What it means in plain English
Bloom, an ad man, admires and criticises adverts all day. He notes that this one is badly placed under the death notices.
In Ithaca he finds flakes of potted meat in his bed: Boylan and Molly ate it there.
Literary context
Plumtree's was a real brand, though Joyce plays freely with its slogan.
References
- Ulysses, Episodes 5, 8, 17 and 18
- Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (revised edition, 1988)
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Questions readers ask
Why under the obituaries?
Bloom thinks it an unfortunate place: dead meat next to the dead.
Related terms
Blazes Boylan
Hugh “Blazes” Boylan is a flashy Dublin concert manager who is organising Molly Bloom's singing tour, and who becomes her lover at 4 pm on 16 June 1904. Bloom knows the meeting is coming and spends the day trying not to think about it.
The Freeman's Journal
The Freeman's Journal was a Dublin nationalist daily newspaper. Bloom sells advertising space for it, carries a copy all day, and visits its offices in Episode 7, “Aeolus”, which is set in the Freeman and Evening Telegraph building.
Leopold Bloom
The central character: a kind, curious advertising canvasser whose wanderings give the novel its shape. Joyce's modern Odysseus.