In a final scene of Dorothy Sayers’s 1930 novel Strong Poison, a murderer devours a large quantity of Turkish delight in the parlor of Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur-sleuth aristocrat. Wimsey, in the course of his gotcha monologue, says, “That disgusting sweetmeat on which you have been gorging yourself in, I must say, a manner totally unsuited to your age and position, is smothered in white arsenic” (emphasis mine). The moment is less well known than Turkish delight’s appearance in the pages of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950). But it raises the question of why this particular dessert should be a symbol of gluttony and death for two English writers of the same generation, and why it occupies a vexed cultural position to this day.
I went on a quest for Turkish delight last year, inspired by a dinner party in which I planned to cook from the work of C. S. Lewis. Almost everyone I told about the party cried out, Turkish delight! But I was reluctant—both because I thought Turkish delight wasn’t really that good, and because I wasn’t perfectly clear on what it is supposed to be. Smooth, or studded with pistachios and dried fruit? A jelly, or a nougat? Does it come in a floury cloud of white powder? And what’s the powder made of? Corn starch? Powdered sugar? A mixture? I found boxes of Turkish delight in three flavors—rose, pistachio, and plain—at a local Middle Eastern grocer, made on site by a Syrian with a secret recipe (I asked for it but was rebuffed). The translucent, colorful squares were dusted with something white, though hardly a floury cloud (and not arsenic, surely?), and when I attempted to unbox them on the evening of the party, I discovered that the two “clear” varieties (rose and plain) were hopelessly stuck together and inedibly chewy. The chunky one, the pistachio, was fine but rubbery. The dessert delighted neither me nor my guests. It caused further embarrassment when I learned that Turkish delight is reputed to be an aphrodisiac . . . and I had priests in attendance.
Contrast that item with the one Lewis describes, which Edmund Pevensie asks for when the White Witch offers him any food of his choosing. After the Witch drops one drop of liquid from her magic bottle and produces “a round box, tied with a green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish delight,” we learn that Edmund’s delight is “sweet and light to the very centre.” Not much to go on—but it may suggest that the “best” Turkish delight exhibits no difference in texture between the outside of the morsel and its center, and possesses a melt-in-your-mouth quality. Several people brought different varieties of Turkish delight to my party, and none had these qualities, or was anything anyone could eat “several pounds of” in a sitting.
It’s become common to observe that real Turkish delight is a disappointment to Narnia readers, with arguments either for or against it. (One camp thinks that Turkish delight is simply not very good. Another holds that it’s just as delicious as Lewis implies, but is an acquired taste for adults. Still a third says it must be tried in the Middle East, or at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.) It’s tempting to suspect that Lewis intended this disappointment as a comment on sin, to the effect that sins aren’t as pleasant as they seem. This interpretation might be supported by the Sayers passage: Wimsey, whose taste was impeccable in his creator’s eyes, finds Turkish delight disgusting. Not at all tempting, but nevertheless common these days, is to suggest that both Sayers and Lewis display the racial biases of their place and time in representing a Middle Eastern dessert as either unpalatable or an exotic temptation. Sayers, unfortunately, was xenophobic, at least toward Jews, and engaged in anti-Semitic tropes for the sake of “humor.” Lewis has been widely, if perhaps unfairly, criticized for the Middle Eastern flavor of some of his characters and settings (a criticism addressed valuably by the theologian Paul Ford).
The contention that Lewis didn’t find Turkish delight delicious runs into trouble when we place it in the context of his thought on pleasure and sin. Turkish delight is a node in a network of virtue-coded food references, which are one of the many ways in which Lewis establishes his moral framework. Turkish delight worked on Edmund as Lewis believed sins work on us. Our sins degrade us: Edmund shovels down his food; his face and hands are sticky. They ruin our appreciation of the good: Afterwards, Edmund feels sick and is unable to eat his proper supper. They also propagate themselves and lead us to further bad behavior, turning our natural desire for the good into a desire for evil. Edmund, grumpy and distracted from wanting more Turkish delight, betrays his siblings later in the book.
The children’s-book explanation of Edmund’s behavior is that the Turkish delight is enchanted so that once people start to eat it, they want more and more, and “would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.” In an adult Christian framework, sins can indeed work this way, but they occur on a slippery slope, often starting with the misuse of legitimate pleasures. If Lewis had deliberately chosen a perversely unappetizing dessert, it would undermine his metaphor and contradict his other work on pleasure, particularly in Perelandra, the second volume of his Space Trilogy. In that book, Lewis asks, What would unfallen pleasure be like? The answer is that it would be wonderful—Lewis was a hedonist, observes Rhys Laverty in Life on the Silent Planet, a new anthology of criticism devoted to Lewis’s science fiction—and we would experience it without the endless craving for more, which is what gets us into trouble.
Turkish delight, then, should be wonderful. And a closer look reveals that it actually should be,and that this most elusive item is elusive for a reason. The dessert, which appeared only in the later eighteenth century, was originally made from wheat starch, sugar syrup, and various flavorings. According to a possibly apocryphal origin story, it was invented by a chef of the sultan as an appeasement for the sultan’s many concubines (perhaps one reason for its reputation as an aphrodisiac), and went locally by the name of lokum. Even at its inception it was a luxury good and not perfectly Turkish—sugar was a rare and dear import (from Cyprus and Egypt) and did not become widely available to Turks until the mid-twentieth century. And soon it became even less authentically Turkish. In the early nineteenth century, Turkey became a symbol of “‘the exotic Orient’ in the European imagination,” according to Mary Işin in Sherbet and Spice: The Complete History of Turkish Sweets. The travelers who flocked there “discovered” lokum, went wild for it, and brought it back to their home countries under a new name, eventually making it one of the world’s best-known sweets.
This dessert, as it was consumed both locally and as an import, sounds more like what Lewis was talking about. Işin quotes American Naval physician James McKay, writing in 1830: Turkish delight was “a delicious pasty-mass which melts away in the mouth, and leaves a fragrant flavor behind.” The French artist and writer Pretextat Lecomte described it as “beautiful” in color and “warm and transparent.” To make it, Turkish confectioners used hand-sifted wheat starch (produced by a domestic process with a long local tradition), and employed a laborious technique that called for several hours of continuous stirring. They used musk and rose water as flavorings, and also sprinkled musk on the powdered sugar coating. They rubbed the trays used to mold it and the scissors used to cut it with fragrant almond oil. By the 1880s, Işin says, the flavors had multiplied to include clotted cream, mastic, almond, and pistachio. In the 1900s came pine nut and hazelnut, and flavors from essences or syrups such as violet, lemon, and bitter orange. This starts to sound like a dessert a child could dream of, or that an open-minded and pleasure-loving adult like C. S. Lewis would find tempting.
It seems likely that very few modern eaters have ever tasted true Turkish delight, at least outside the Grand Bazaar. All contemporary recipes use corn starch. Musk oil is illegal. The hours-of-hand-stirring production method has surely been lost. Few of those wonderful-sounding flavors are available, and those that are probably don’t employ ingredients as they used to be. (The only truly splendid rosewater I’ve ever tried came in a recycled water bottle and had been hand-made by someone’s grandmother in Iran. Small-batch almond oil bears no resemblance to its supermarket cousin.) Contemporary exports of Turkish delight from Turkey face lower demand and longer shelf-times than they would have at the peak of the craze, hence the rubbery texture.
In fact, for the true experience, Turkish delight must be consumed fresh, according to research by Tim Richardson, author of Sweets: A History of Candy. Richardson, like Edmund Pevensie, found in Turkish delight what a schoolboy longs for above all other desserts. A stash of old-fashioned Turkish delight, imported by his grandfather, that he encountered as a boy is what inspired his lifelong interest in sweets. So for my next party, perhaps I should get out the almond oil, hand-sift some wheat starch, and get stirring.
