Turkish delight

• 1. Introduction

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  Turkish delight, called lokum in Turkey, is a family of sweets built on a gel of starch and sugar. English speakers once knew it as "lumps of delight", a name that says plenty about the pleasure it promised. Today the same chewy sweet turns up in coffeehouses, wedding feasts, chocolate bars and a famous children's novel. Yet nobody agrees on what to call it, and nobody agrees on who made it first. Was it a confectioner in Constantinople, or does the recipe run back through Persia and Byzantium? And how does one sweet end up with so many names and so many roles?

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• 2. Comfort of the Throat

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  The Turkish words lokma and lokum come from the Arabic luqma, which means a morsel or a mouthful. The scholar Nişanyan describes a longer path. He traces lokma to lātiloḳum, meaning a sweet made with starch, which in turn comes from the Arabic rāḥatu'l-ḥulḳūm, or comfort of the throat. He adds that lokum was originally the name of the fried dough dessert now known as lokma. The commercial product called rahatül-hulkum, known from the 17th century, is understood to have drifted into the shorter name through sound similarity, as latilokum became lokum. Formal Arabic still uses the phrase meaning comfort of the throat.

  Other Arabic-speaking regions chose different words. Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Tunisia say ḥalqūm, while Kuwait says kabdat alfaras. Lebanon, Palestine and Syria call it rāḥa. Egyptian Arabic uses malban or ʕagameyya, although malban can also name a grape fruit leather made with semolina and grape juice, popular in the Levant.

  Ottoman Turkish lokum, or rahat-ul hulküm, seeded the names used in many Eastern European languages. Armenians say lokhum, Assyrian speakers say läoma, and Persian keeps the old phrase as rāhat-ol-holqum. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and Israel say rahat lokum, a blend of the two Ottoman names that was already muddled in Ottoman Turkish and can still be heard in Turkey. Serbo-Croatian trimmed the blend to ratluk. Hungarians went their own way with szultán kenyér, meaning Sultan's bread, a name that credits royalty with a sweet whose true inventor remains in dispute.

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• 3. Contested Inventors

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  In 1777, according to a popular account, Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir left his hometown of Kastamonu for Constantinople. He opened a confectionery shop in the Bahçekapı district and sold many kinds of candy and lokum. Later he added a distinctive lokum made with starch and sugar. Some sources instead say lokum was invented in Safavid Iran.

  Tim Richardson, a historian of sweets, questions the credit given to Hacı Bekir. He wrote that "specific names and dates are often erroneously associated with the invention of particular sweets, not least for commercial reasons". Persian recipes that combine starch and sugar predate Bekir by several centuries. The Oxford Companion to Food agrees that although Bekir is often credited, there is no real evidence for it.

  The Byzantine Empire also had a lokum-like dish, called paloudakin or apalodaton in Medieval Greek. It was borrowed from the Saracens, though the recipe itself was Persian in origin. Byzantine cooks followed no fixed method. One description calls the sweet "yellow by the color of honey" and made from sugar dissolved with rosewater, a flavor that still defines the candy.

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• 4. Fillings and Flavors

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  Rosewater, mastic gum, bergamot orange and lemon are the traditional flavorings of lokum. Cinnamon and mint are also common. Premium varieties change the balance completely, because chopped dates, pistachios, hazelnuts or walnuts make up most of the piece and the gel merely binds them together.

  The gel is sticky, so the sweet is usually packed as small cubes. Makers dust them with icing sugar, copra or powdered cream of tartar to stop them clinging. That gummy interior also left a descendant. Turkish delight was an early precursor to the jelly bean, inspiring its soft center.

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• 5. Eastern Tables

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  In Armenia, lokhum goes into cigarette cookies, soft pastries rolled into the shape of a cigarette. The filling is lokhum, a mixture of sugar, cardamom and walnuts, or a combination of both. The dough is made mainly from matzoon, butter, eggs and flour, and the finished pastry is dusted with powdered sugar.

  The sweet reached the European parts of the Ottoman Empire under Ottoman rule and has stayed popular there. Rosewater and walnut are the most common flavorings. In Bulgaria it is called lokum and enjoys some popularity.

  Greece has loved loukoumi since the 19th century or earlier. The city of Patras is famous for Patrina loukoumia, and the sweet is also made on the island of Syros and in Thessaloniki, Serres and Komotini. Greek households routinely serve it instead of biscuits. Mastic-flavored loukoumi is very popular, alongside the rosewater and bergamot varieties. The town of Serres alone makes a similar sweet called akanés. In Greece the product is marketed as Greek Delight.

  Cyprus markets its version as Cyprus Delight, and it is the only country with a protected geographical indication for the product. Loukoumi made in Yeroskipou is sold as Λουκούμι Γεροσκήπου.

  Romanians call the sweet rahat. They eat it as it comes or fold it into cakes such as cornulețe, cozonac and salam de biscuiţi. Serbian tables pair ratluk with tea and coffee. Far to the southeast, cooks in Karachi took the idea in a different direction.

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• 6. Halwa Variants

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  In Karachi, now in Pakistan, a sweet called Karachi halwa was made with corn flour and ghee and became quite popular. It is said to have been developed by Chandu Halwai, which later relocated to Bombay, now Mumbai, after the partition in 1947. Some confectioners renamed it Bombay Halwa to avoid any connection with a Pakistani city.

  In 1896, a confectioner named Giridhar Mavji ran a shop called Joshi Budhakaka Mahim Halwawala. He tried replacing the starch with wheat flour, and the result was Mahim halwa, which comes as flat sheets. Not long after his experiment, a different shop opened far to the northwest, in Ireland.

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• 7. Chocolate and Commonwealth

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  Hadji Bey was an Armenian emigrant to Ireland who set up a company under his own name in 1902. It produced rahat lokoum for the Irish market and later the UK market, and the company still exists today.

  Fry's Turkish Delight followed in 1914. Cadbury markets it in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand. This version is flavored with rosewater and covered on all sides in milk chocolate. UK production moved to Poland in 2010.

  In Canada, Nestlé makes the Big Turk bar, in which dark magenta Turkish delight is coated in milk chocolate. The sweet's most famous fictional appearance came from a children's novel published in 1950.

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• 8. Narnia and Ceremony

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  In C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch uses enchanted Turkish delight to win the loyalty of Edmund Pevensie. Sales of the sweet rose after the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe reached theaters.

  Outside fiction, Turkish delight carries deep meaning in Greece, Turkey, Iran and across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. It symbolizes hospitality, generosity and celebration. At Turkish weddings, lokum stands for sweetness and prosperity in the couple's life together. During Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, family and friends exchange it as gifts.

  In Greece, loukoumi signals hospitality and refinement. A plate beside a guest's tea or coffee still tells the visitor that they are welcome and respected.

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