The Elusive Taste of Xetery
“Xetery!” Joyce shrieked, hurling Great Grub magazine the length of her spacious kitchen. The cover shot of her own airbrushed face sailed over the breakfast bar and her husband Roger then hit the wall and crumpled onto the spotless floor.
Roger looked up from his croissant. “What the…?”
“Xetery!” Joyce barked and stormed out.
“Xetery?” Was the first question from that blasted Great Grub journalist, the one with the cleavage and the smug smile. A question calculated to ruffle the unrufflable Joyce Carrigan.
When Joyce had first spied “xetery,” indelibly printed on page 130 of her new cookery book, The Joy of Broccoli, she was merely irritated.
“Drat,” she thought. “How did I miss that?” Moreover, how did her agent, editor, sub-editor, copyeditor and multiple proof readers, not to mention Roger?
This was long before the days when printed publications were issued with typos as a matter of course. Joyce Carrigan had a hard-earned reputation for precision and xetery was an unwelcome blot on that reputation. She consoled herself that few would notice one typo buried in a recipe for ‘betterave en croûte’. Any discerning reader would quickly understand that ‘xetery, 1 stick’ should read ‘celery’ and move on to parboiling her beetroot, or so Joyce thought.
“Excuse my ignorance.” The blasted journalist smiled too sweetly. “What exactly is xetery?”
The cleavage had already irked Joyce, but it was the smug smile that provoked her flippant response.
“Xetery?” She donned a puzzled frown before feigning comprehension. “Ah! You mean “he-te-ri”. Your pronunciation threw me. The “x” is more guttural, like the “ch” in a Scottish “loch” and the emphasis is on the second “e”. “’Heteri,’ you see?”
“‘Heteri’?” The blasted journalist repeated. “I confess I’m none the wiser.” The smile was slightly less smug.
“No,” sighed Joyce, “I can’t imagine a person of your…” Her gesture was vague but precise enough to refer to the cleavage. “…would ever have heard of xetery. It is unfamiliar to the common palate.”
“Oh?” The smile vanished. The blasted journalist started making notes.
“…and of course, spring is not xetery season, even in the parts of South America where it grows.”
“Out of season.” She nodded and noted. The balance of power was restored.
“Unfortunate timing… with the publication date…” Joyce muttered, convinced she had quashed xetery once and for all.
Then there it was. The first question in the interview. The blasted journalist was unembarrassed to show herself ignorant. The magazine remained crumpled on the kitchen floor. Joyce sulked for the rest of the morning. Then Roger took her out to lunch at the Casa delle Vongole and half a bottle of Valpolicella addressed Joyce’s mood nicely. By the time she returned to the kitchen that evening to rustle up a nettle salad for dinner, the magazine had vanished from the floor as well as Joyce’s mind. She forgot about xetery, until the first letter arrived.
Exhausted and exhilarated after her tour promoting The Joy of Broccoli, Joyce returned home to Roger and a heap of fan mail. She reclined in her favourite armchair, a glass of sherry to hand, eager to learn how her readers had enjoyed her daring new recipes for ‘petit pois à la banane’, ‘chou farci au chou-fleur’ and her pièce de resistance, ‘broccoli surprise’.
“Dear Mrs Carrigan,” the first letter began with the usual pleasantries and compliments, but swiftly veered into unexpected territory. “Since purchasing your most excellent work, The Joy of Broccoli, I have been trying and dismally failing, to acquire the elusive stick of xetery necessary to concoct your intriguing recipe for ‘betterave en croûte’ (p. 130).”
“For goodness sake!” Joyce tossed the letter aside, took a swig of sherry and turned to the next on the pile. This second reader was triumphant. “I bought the last packet of xetery from a vendor in a small farmers’ market.” Joyce was as baffled as she was bemused. “Unfortunately, the xetery is dried and ground. I write urgently for your advice as to how much to use in the recipe. I imagine xetery is potent stuff! I don’t want to overdo it and ruin my betterave en croûte.”
To Joyce’s amazement, letter after letter returned to the same recipe from The Joy of Broccoli.
Xetery roused two distinct reactions in her readers. There were those who believed that xetery could be bought or found, dug up or plucked, and they were determined to find it. They conferred with shop owners and supermarket staff, trawled markets and boutiques and sought advice from vendors of exotic spices. Some consulted gastronomic encyclopaedias and despite all evidence, their faith remained intact. If Joyce Carrigan wrote xetery in a recipe then xetery must exist.
Joyce had even received three letters from one P Newnham. In the first, he confidently wrote, “I have contacted my second cousin Nigel, who lives in a small town on the Peruvian-Bolivian border. He has promised to procure several sticks of xetery from a reliable source and airmail them to me. I await their arrival, my beetroot at the ready.” The second letter reported that Nigel was having trouble with his supplier. In the third P Newnham updated Joyce that “the harvest of xetery in the Peruvian uplands was particularly poor this year as the plantations have suffered an outbreak of Oruga Muy Hambrienta.”
Other readers simply requested the name of Joyce’s own xetery supplier.
The lengths that Joyce’s readers went to in their attempts to procure xetery were astounding but, knowing that xetery would forever elude them, Joyce was more intrigued by the other group. These readers substituted. After a brief glance through the cupboard or shuffle around the shelves of their local grocery store, they gave up on obtaining the original ingredient and went for its closest equivalent. What, might one ask, is the best substitute for one stick of xetery?
Many a great brain plumped for celery and found the results most pleasing. A few mischievous readers even suggested that Joyce might consider dropping the exotic xetery for a humble celery stick in the next edition of the book. Others had substituted a stick of cinnamon, and their enthusiasm about the results sent Joyce into her own kitchen to whip up the new version.
Some were more inventive. Many were convinced they already knew the elusive taste of xetery.
“Xetery being so sweet, I added three tablespoons of raw cane sugar…”
“Xetery gives an acidic tang to balance the sweetness of beetroot. I used half a lemon and half an orange…”
“Xetery, I believe, has quite an astringent flavour, so I tried powdered acorn…”
Others were less confident: “I have tried (separately): chili, raisins, aubergine and star anise. None of these produce a dish of Joyce Carrigan standards. Could you please advise?”
There were those whose recipes were a terrible flop, but many were delighted with the results of their own creativity and eager to share their triumph with Joyce Carrigan herself. Joyce moved from letter to letter, spellbound by the effect of a simple typo. The imagination of her readers was extraordinary. It went without saying that anyone who bought a Joyce Carrigan cookery book was a discerning gastronome. Xetery had simply released her readers’ own creative faculties.
When Joyce told Roger about the letters, he frowned. “Darling, what will this do to your reputation when your readers realise that you’re teasing them?”
“I am not teasing them.”
“You were when you gave that interview to Great Grub.”
“I’ll announce a correction,” she resolved.
Joyce dialled her editor’s number, but she returned the receiver to its cradle without ever making the call. While letters continued to arrive, she wanted to wait just a little longer, to see what marvellous new recipes her readers would devise.
In the meantime, she replied to her fan mail with her habitual grace and charm. To the most desperate she proposed that a stick of celery might work just as well in their “betterave en croûte,” if they really couldn’t find any xetery at this time of year.
The success of xetery was such that by the time Joyce had ended her season of promotions for The Joy of Broccoli and was turning her mind to her next cookery book, she was determined to repeat the experiment. Once the final proofs of Poultry for Poltroons were complete, she made one small, deliberate substitution. On page 84, in the long list of ingredients for “poulet farci aux sardines,” Joyce altered “1 tbsp paprika” for “1 tbsp palila.” It was a small change. Like xetery, she judged, the smaller the change, the less conspicuous. Her editors didn’t bat a single eyelid between them. Joyce Carrigan’s authority was unchallenged. She sat back and awaited her readers’ responses.
Unfortunately for Joyce, palila turned out to be a species of Hawaiian honeycreeper. Most readers were, naturally, horrified by the suggestion that they should include a whole tablespoon of this critically endangered bird in their chicken recipe. Others were alarmingly gung-ho, and Joyce was quickly persuaded to issue a public statement clarifying that her palila was most definitely not that palila.
“Then which palila is Mrs Carrigan referring to?” Came the tedious but predictable enquiry. Joyce was persistently vague, muttering about coastal regions in Sub-Saharan Africa and somehow convincing readers that palila was both a fish and a herb.
Once the misunderstanding had been tidied away, many a reader dutifully set out on the hunt for palila. Nigel was still sifting Peru for xetery, but P Newnham had an old school chum in The Gambia who promised him a whole bushel of palila. Meanwhile, Joyce’s discerning gastronomes created their own new flavours with a wealth of inventive substitutions.
“I have made the most delicious fish-based marinade for my chicken…”
“I added a tablespoon of popping corn to the sardines, with surprising, and noisy, results…”
“I was short on palila, so I used a stick of xetery…”
Joyce resolved to research her typos more carefully for her next cookery book. In the meantime, she put her feet up to enjoy the results of the corrected palila and when a new creation proved too tempting to resist, she set her feet down and scurried back to her kitchen to test her readers’ recipes.
Every Joyce Carrigan cookery book after The Joy of Broccoli featured at least one, sometimes even two or three, discreet typos. As time passed, letters to Dear Mrs Carrigan were succeeded by emails to Dear Joyce (if I may). Even the invention of Google proved no barrier to Joyce’s inventiveness. As she often said, “These search engines are wonderful, but not everything is available on the World Wide Web. Besides, what website or app can convey the taste of any food? Food is a multi-sensory, in-the-moment experience. You must test it on your own tongue to truly appreciate the taste of xetery.”
There were sticky moments. Palila was not Joyce’s last controversy. When filming the television series to accompany her forthcoming volume Nuts about Nuts, Joyce was obliged to furnish genuine kedta nuts for the prying eye of the camera. After hours of foraging in local woodland, she presented her viewing public with a swift glimpse of some misshapen beech nut kernels, casually noting the similarity between kedta nuts and beech nut kernels to neutralise the bluff.
Then there was that terrible spat with eminent anthropologist, Professor Claire Rigby. Since Joyce aimed to encourage her readers’ creativity, she often tried to discourage their attempts at acquiring her elusive ingredients. (Though P Newnham proved extraordinarily persistent). Her assertion that narriba was the term used by a small Amazonian tribe for a most delicate and flavoursome local berry provoked the fury of Professor Rigby, who went to absurd lengths to prove her wrong. At one point, Joyce thought she was going to have to kayak up the Amazon River to salvage her reputation. “It’s very arrogant of Professor Rigby to claim rights on every language in the Amazon basin,” she complained to Roger. He graciously set out in her place and succeeded in recording an Amazonian elder saying something that could well have been “narriba.”
Sometimes, when Joyce was in a confessional mood, she mused that she would one day come clean and admit to having invented ingredients. She pictured herself in the televised interview. “Readers must be given the confidence to trust their own creative instincts,” she’d say. “We’re so patronising, prescribing step-by-step recipes, when our readers have such remarkable culinary talents of their own.”
Roger would disapprove. “What about your reputation? I kayaked up the Amazon for your reputation.”
Sometimes, when Joyce was in a fanciful mood, she mused that she’d one day write an entire cookery book with only invented recipes for non-existent dishes using fictional ingredients. Perhaps only thus would she inspire her readers to achieve the greatest culinary heights. Perhaps only thus would she propel them to a zenith of flavour, taste and texture. Perhaps only thus would Joyce Carrigan uncover the ultimate recipe, the transcendent dish.
Would she ever dare? And what would Roger say?
In the meantime, she spent her days awaiting correspondence and attempting to recreate, to recapture the elusive taste of xetery.
C S Mee grew up in Birkenhead, England, and now lives in Durham, after years studying literature and languages in the UK and elsewhere. Her short stories have won the Galley Beggar Press short story prize, the Northern Writers’ Clare Swift Short Story Award and the Wasafiri New Writing competition. She has published writing in the EcoTheo Review, the Fish Anthology, Popshot Magazine and Wasafiri, as well as in anthologies and online. She is working on a collection of stories exploring the perspectives of babies and children.
