Turkish delight

Turkish delight, known in Turkey as lokum, is a soft confection made from a gel of starch and sugar. Traditionally flavored with rosewater or citrus and dusted with powdered sugar, it is one of the best-known sweets of the Ottoman culinary heritage and remains popular across the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean.

History

The origins of Turkish delight are not documented with precision. It is often credited to the confectioner Hacı Bekir Effendi, who settled in Constantinople from Anatolia in 1776, but historians of sweets regard that attribution with caution. Persian recipes based on starch and sugar predate him by several centuries, and the Oxford Companion to Food notes that there is no real evidence for his invention.

Some scholars suggest that lokum descends from an Arab confection called lohoch, perhaps developed by apothecaries around the ninth century. The Byzantine Empire had a related dish, paloudakin, described as a starch candy dissolved with rosewater. Under Ottoman rule the sweet spread through the Balkans, where it still survives in Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, as well as in Levantine and North African kitchens.

Its international fame owes much to Britain. In the early twentieth century it was sold there as Turkish Delight, a name that has stuck in English-speaking countries. Today it is produced industrially worldwide, in forms ranging from chocolate-coated bars to flavored gummy sweets.

Culture

In Turkey, lokum is served with Turkish coffee and appears at festive occasions such as weddings and religious holidays, where it stands for sweetness and prosperity. In the eighteenth century it became fashionable for ladies to give it wrapped in lace handkerchiefs, a custom that lovers also adopted, as traditional love songs of the period attest.

In Greece, loukoumi is customarily offered with coffee instead of biscuits, and the Cypriot town of Yeroskipou holds a protected geographical indication for its local version. In Armenia it is used as a filling for cookies, and in Palestine it is made with nuts and shredded coconut. In Romania it is known as rahat and is folded into traditional cakes.

Trivia