Hell loa and welcome to Savor production of iHeart Radio. I'm Annie Reese and I'm.
Lauren Vogel Bam, and today we have an episode for you about Turkish delight.
Yes, was there any particular reason this was on your mind?
Lauren?
Well ed?
Alpha tyre was this past weekend. It's a holiday celebrating the end in the breaking of the fast of the holy month of Ramadan. And it's a family and community holiday, you know, like people dress up nice kids especially might get gifts. There's feasting and a lot of treats, and you know, of course there are all kinds of traditions and cuisines attached to eat all around the world. But a treat that I saw come up pretty often was Turkish delight, and I've been wanting to do an episode about it.
So here we are, Here we are. Yes, I don't have too much experience with Turkish delight. I think I've had some none of it. I think has been the good stuff, shall we say?
Oh okay, yeah, I haven't had the fancy kinds, but just the plain old like like rosewater jelly cubes type is actually one of my favorite things. And I know that that makes like I've seen a lot of There have been many words spoken about how terrible Turkish delight is on the internet. I think mostly from people who didn't know what it was when they read Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and were imagining chocolate.
And but I really like rose water.
Yes, which, speaking of you can see our fictional foods episode that we did on Chronicles of Narnia where we did talk about this.
Or our rosewater episode maybe like marshmallow vaguely related?
Sure, yeah, cream of Tartar an episode of that I definitely did.
Yes, Oh yes, I consulted my notes for that in here, so uh perfect.
Well, I guess that breaks us to you our questions. Sure, Turkish delight, what is it?
Well?
Turkish delight, also called lookum, is a type of soft jelly candy that can come in any number of flavors and like combinations with other confectionery items, but at its simplest, you're looking at a bite sized flavored gel candy that's sort of bouncy or slightly chewy or like tender gummy in texture and very sweet, usually with a coating of powdered sugar and starch to prevent the separate pieces from sticking together in the box, or you know, whatever receptacle
they come in. The flavor might be rose water or another floral, maybe vanilla, or citrus like orange or lemon, or another fruit like pomegranate or bear of some kind. The gel tends to be brightly colored, often with food coloring.
But all of that is.
Just the tip of the Turkish delight iceberg. Because locum can be studded or rolled in chopped nuts like mustachios or almonds, or dried fruit like dates or coconut. It can be layered with nougat and rolled up like a little jelly roll. You can wrap it around a cream filling or coated with chocolate if.
You want to.
It's often served as a snack or a dessert, especially with like strong coffee or tea, and on special occasions, each piece is just a sweet, squoshy little pillow. It's like, you know how there's always some brand of stuffed animals that becomes like a pop culture thing, you know, like beanie babies or squish mollows or whatever it is at the time, But like stuffed animals themselves are just incredibly
classic because they're just soft and nice. Yeah, locum is like eating a hug with a fun stuffed animal.
I'm pillow pit partial myself.
Oh uh huh yeah yeah, but it is lovely, yeah right, and there's it's just fun.
There's nothing wrong fun, no, there is it?
So uh yes, a Turkish delight is within the category of like jelly or gummy type candies. So what you're looking to do when you're making it is to figure out a way to make sugar slightly chewy. And there are a number of ways to do that, like sugar just by itself, plus water can be cooked to it
to a soft chewy stage. But we're looking for a gel here, which means that you're gonna want to add something that'll glom onto water and form like a like a soft scaffold kind of kind of thing within the mass. And that something can be a starch like cornstarcher pectin and or a protein like gelatin. Gelatin is controversial. Don't come at me, people do use it. I'm sorry, I'm like a little nervous. This is something that people have opinions about, for sure, you know, we love strong opinions.
But also right, I'm not telling you, I'm just reporting the facts. Okay, So to make crystallized sugar into a chewy gel, you heat it with water or other liquid until it dissolves, and then keep cooking it to simmer out a bunch of the water and sugar.
But by which I.
Mean soucrose here really likes being a crystal, so you have to do this carefully. To prevent recrystallization. You can add an already stable liquid sugar like corn starch, and or add cream of tartar, which breaks soup grows down into fruitose and glucose, which don't care as much about being in crystal form. How much water you simmer out
during this process depends. I've read recipes for softball stage and for hardball stage, which are candy making terms that describe what the sugar will do when it cools down. But in either case you wind up with this gel instead of like a toffi or caramel sort of thing, because that starch that you add will will hold on to a bit of extra water dispersed evenly through the sugar mixture. When you heat starch and water, it'll gelatinize,
forming a flexible matrix. The set on the final candy can be anywhere from like pillowy, soft gummy like sort of like a extra soft gum drop in texture to more stretchy or chewy. People have opinions about which is correct or preferable. Again, I'm not here to tell you your Turkish delight business.
No no no, no no no.
Flavorings can vary. A lot water or orange blossom water are perhaps the most traditional. A lot of recipes do call for some tart citrus juice like lemon or lime in with the water as you're cooking down the sugar. It'll provide a little bit of flavor and also help prevent crystallization. You can use almost all fruit juice, though, like maybe pomegranate or BlackBerry. You can use milk. You can add flavoring like mint or coffee to the jel itself.
You can add flavoring to the powder coating, like maybe cinnamon or cocoa. But once you get beyond the territory of this is a soft gummy candy and into the arena of this is a base for something more complicated. People do all kinds of wild things, any fruit flavor, you can imagine, any type of nuts, all kinds of cream fillings or jams, or like soft chocolate, you know, coat it in any dang thing you like, rice, crispies,
I don't know, crushed oreos, saffron, Okay, confusing but cool. Yeah, Turkish delight can also be used as a filling in chocolates or pastries. And yeah, it can be a simple treat with coffee or a fancy gift or a snack at celebrations. I understand that. I read that in some Turkish funerary traditions, locum is served to mourners on specific anniversaries of the loved one's death. I couldn't find much more about it than that, so if you have any
experience with this, please write in. I know asking about funerary traditions on a food show is a little weird, but you know us that it's not that weird.
No, and there are a lot of funerary traditions that involve food. So oh of course, yeah, m hm, Well what about the nutrition. Sugar is a treat? Treats are nice? Yes, yes, indeed, we do have a couple numbers for you, we do.
Okay, So.
Turkish delight is not only from Turkey, but it's from the wider surrounding area but there are laws in Turkey about what canon cannot be called Turkish delight, and one that I found very specific is that the moisture content in locom can only be sixteen percent that otherwise it's not locom. Wow, yeah, that is very specific. Well, it can be under that, but it cannot be run that anyway. Okay,
sixteen percent. As of two thousand and one, locum made up some ten percent of Turkey's confectionery industry, which amounted to about forty two thousand tons.
Wow. Yeah, that's only ten percent.
People like candy treats are nice.
It's true, that's true. There has also this isn't there's a number in here. There has been a wide scoping music festival in Macedonia called Locomfest for a couple decades. It was named after like the spirit of sharing cultures and customs over a little bit of locom and some coffee in like old marketplaces like it's held in an
Ottoman era, bizarre from like the fourteen hundreds. It was in its seventeenth year in twenty twenty three, having hosted some eighty bands over the years, but their website has not been updated since then. So I do not know the fate of Locomfest.
Once again, listeners, Yeah, if you know, please write it. But yes, there is a very interesting history behind this street.
There is, yes, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from a quick break forward from our sponsors.
And we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you. Okay.
So the origins of Turkish delight are locum are hard to pin down. Some believe that this sweet or something very similar to it, was invented by Arabs the ninth century CE. Others claim it wasn't until the eighteenth century when it was invented. Others point to similar candies that were being made in the Middle Ages.
Mysteries history.
Yeah, yeah, the predecessors of Turkish delight as we know it today would have had a slightly different flavor and texture. The sugar component would have been honey or a syrup made from cooking down juice like grape or figs or mulberries, and the starch would have been flour, So a little bit of a different thing.
Yeah, which is always an issue when we try to get to the bottom of these things. But there is one big name that comes up when trying to get to the bottom of the history of Turkish delight, and that is Turkey's Hadja Bakir and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing it, please write in let me know. Which was a confectionery opened in seventeen seventy seven in modern day Istanbul. It was the brainchild of a confectioner named Bakir, and it specialized in locum and this treat was incredibly popular
and words spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. They were so popular that Sultan Mahmoud the Second hired Baker to serve as the palace as chief confectioner, a position that remained in his family until nineteen twenty, when the Ottoman Empire came to an end. By this point, they were already exporting their products to other countries around the world, and travelers from places like England would bring the treats back home with them too, so they were really making a
name for themselves. The business remains in the family. You can still read about them, and they claimed the recipe hasn't changed since the addition of cornstarch to replace the
flower in the mid eighteen hundreds. That being said, it is also more than possible another confectioner or confectioners working in the Palace were the ones responsible for locum, and Hadja Bikir was the first to export it, so they were often viewed as the original creators because of that, but you know how it goes, probably a lot of people were involved.
Yep, yep.
Processed sugar started being used as it became more available in the eighteen hundreds as well.
Yes, and these early versions were flavored with almonds, pistachios, musk, and or rose oil.
Mastic was another flavoring that was used. It's a type of tree resin with like a kind of piny cedery sort of flavor.
And while the ingredients were fairly simple, a recipe printed in a journal in eighteen ninety four described the rather arduous process of making it lots of very specific stirring and specific directions that required two people to get the right consistency, and perhaps because of that difficulty, Locum was not really successfully replicated outside of Turkey for.
A long time.
That being said, jumping ahead a bit, in the nineteen twenties, confectioners in the US began offering similar products to Locum under a variety of names, and perhaps The most notable example was applets, which was made with fresh apples, honey and walnuts, and cutlets, which was the same but apricots instead of apples. All right, so they were the product of two Armenian immigrants, Arman Turtsegian and Mark Balaban. After arriving in America, the two met at a YMCA in
Seattle and they decided to go into business together. They tried a couple of things that didn't work out before they purchased and orchard in Kashmir, Washington to use up any extra fruit they had started making these candies. Both had experience with locum from their childhoods in Armenia, but they eventually realized they couldn't provide shelf stability and quality control using the fresh off the orchard apples, so they
sold the orchards. They were intent on becoming the first commercial producers of locum in the US, though they did not give up this. Their product, especially the applets, gained a lot of popularity and became a sought after tourist item. In nineteen sixty two, the product was offered at the Seattle's World Fair and that gave it even more popularity. Eventually, they decreased the amount of rosewater they used and added
in some pectin. For a while they really avoided the Turkish Delight label due to the tensions between Turkey and Armenia, but they eventually decided to it. But when I looked it up in their shop, you can still get applets and cottlets and fruit delights, but you can also get Turkish Delights. Yeah, they have a history on their website if you want to check it out. It's really interesting.
And then yes, in nineteen fifty C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe introduced many people to Turkish Delight. Many people who hadn't heard of it before didn't know it right, perhaps Americans. Yes, yes, I think that is accurate. And this was the candy that tempted Edmund Pevensey and led him to betraying his siblings. Prior to the book's release,
the English apparently called the Sweet Lumps of Delight. In either case, the book really made this candy sound like it was the best thing ever.
Basically, this is what you want actually if you were a kid.
And there are a couple of reasons why Lewis chose this treat to exemplify that. So the UK had been importing Turkish lights since at least eighteen sixty one, and it was so popular a treat that specialty stores started popping up.
Yeah, the good stuff was generally imported and expensive.
Yes, and during World War Two people would line up for these treats.
For candy in general, Yeah, sugar was already being rationed early on in the war by the beginning of nineteen forty.
After nineteen forty two, confectioneries were placed in the category of items that needed both coupons and additional money to purchase. Even with ration coupons, they were expensive. So because of this, they became somewhat associated with Christmas as like a gift, something people couldn't have all the time. And if you remember from our fictional foods at episode, or perhaps your own reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when we first encounter Nardia, it was always winter and
never Christmas. That story also took place during World War Two, which is when Lewis himself was writing the book. So it makes sense in a lot of ways that Turkish delight was the suite that Lewis went with.
Yeah, Honestly, like Edmund is being a total goober when he asks the White Witch for it, specifically, because it's not just like, hey can I have candy? It's like, hey can I have like the fancy imported candy. To be fair, he was having a rough time, But I like.
This strong opinions about Edmund.
It's fair.
That's the entire point of the character is that he's being a goober, and then he learns how to be less Gooberriy, that's the whole that's the whole concept. It's not it's yes Lewis's opinion mine.
They should print that on the back of the book. That should be a review.
I remember seeing online and now I have no idea if like, I don't think I just invented it whole cloth. But I remember seeing on the internet a review for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on like Amazon or something, and some cranky old fellow being like, this book is just chilling for Turkish delight. And I don't even know what that is. I don't know if it was made up or not.
But that's so funny. Someone, if that's true, that someone took the time to be like I have to say, as a kid, When I read that book, I had never heard of Turkish delight, and it sounded like it did to me, sound like, this is the best thing ever. I must get my hands on it. And I read a lot of kind of funny articles where they had a similar experience, and when they tried Turkish delights, the quality we cannot say what it was, because I again think I probably haven't had really good Turkish light.
They're disappointed.
Yeah, it's also I do understand that rose water is not a very common flavor that a lot of Americans have encountered modernly, you know, like we that whole thing where we really switched hard to vanilla sometime in the eighteen hundreds. But yeah, it's you know, he just doesn't like, like C. S. Lewis doesn't put a lot of description into the book because it's kind of like, you know, from his point of view, you don't really have to
describe it. It's just Turkish delight. It's something that everyone is familiar with. But yeah, it's in this fancy box and hears magically because the White Witch just kind of summons it. And yeah, the only thing that he writes is that each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious.
That's it. The imagination does wonder story.
I mean, you gotta figure it.
I mean, you know it's you gotta figure it's good because he's willing to sell out his family for more Turkish delight.
Yeah, but I.
Think you're missing. I mean, that's missing the point that it's enchanted. It's you know, right, it's not just the Turkish delight, right, but especially it.
As a kid who had never heard of it, and you're like, oh, why can't I get this?
What is this? Yeah? But you can.
I mean.
Turkish Light is still going strong, a lot of story, special life in it. The store we mentioned still going and how's a really interesting history if you want to look it up.
Uh yeah, yeah, and right in America that's Liberty Orchards, Yes, that is yes. And then yeah, there are all kinds of guides to all the best sweet shops around Istanbul and beyond. If oh, if you ever have gotten a chance to go, if you have a favorite like weird cool flavor, if yes, one want to know all about it?
We do.
But that is what we have to say about Turkish.
Delight for now.
We do already have some listener mail for you, though, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from one more quick break for a word from our sponsors, and we're back.
Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you, and we're back with listen.
May Delight.
Yeah.
Yes, speaking of Michael wrote and one of your recent listener mails you were discussing hatch green chili and ask for recipes. Here's a link to the way back machine that has a copy of the now out of print Coachina Day, New Mexico. This is a recipe book that was put out by the Power Company of New Mexico P and M. This book is what our family used for years. It has the basis for some really good
green chili dishes and other local favorites. Okay, so listeners, if you want to write in, if you if you want the link, write in, we'll send it to you.
But thank you.
We'd love we'd love recipes. We love books, yes, and I love I love green chili.
So I have some canned stuff.
I know it's not as good as the real.
Thing, but I do love it. I love it so much.
A little bit little bit of a chili fanatic over here, yeah, just a little bit. A listener who did not include their name wrote, I thought i'd give you my family's Irish soda bread recipe, adjusted by me for weight based so that I can make it super quickly. Okay, So two hundred and fifty grams of white flour, two hundred and fifty grams of whole meal flour, one and a half teaspoons of salt, one and a half teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, four hundred and fifty grams of buttermilk.
Preheat oven to two hundred celsius. I'm not going to do that translation for you. Sorry, not sorry, And line a dust pan with flour. Sift to the flowers, the salt and the soda. Add the buttermilk and mix with a spoon until it's come together. Tip onto a surface, bring into a ball, Put onto a tray, and with a flowered long sharp knife, cut across on the top of the dough about three centimeters deep. Bake for twenty to thirty five minutes until the loaf sounds hollow when
tapped underneath. Transferred to a wire rackt to cool completely before serving. I love it with butter and marmalade.
Thank you so much. Again.
We love recipes and this sounds very simple, like possibly I won't mess it up. That's the whole point of this bread Annie, Yes, I know, but I yeah, just sounds super easy. And I do love like the insider tips of you know, tapping on the just tap it and see if it sounds hollow or things like that. Yeah, I just love these sort of things we pass along
to people. My friend has one with watermelon when she's like, if you look for the yellow spot and if you tap it, it sounds like this, that's a good water.
Okay, yeah, yeah, no, that's absolutely still haven't still haven't done any baking yet.
We're falling down, Lord, we are. We need to catch up.
Our feast is ever increasing.
That feast is gonna kill us.
It's gonna have to be like a month long event, savor fest feast something like that.
Well, thank you so much to both of these listeners for writing in. If you would like to write shows, you can. Our email is hello at saberpod dot com.
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