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Turkish Delights
These are the sweetmeats of the harem, imported at such high prices. Boil 2 1/2 pounds of loaf sugar with 1 3/4 pints of water; when it is clear, add 65 drachms of starch, dissolved in a little cold water. Stir until the sugar has become a thick paste, add 25 drachms of water and 1 cup of chopped almonds; flavor with rose, lemon, or any fruit extract. Pour into oiled pans, 1 inch deep. When cold, cut into squares and dip each into powdered sugar. They will keep some time in tin boxes.
A workable but very compressed account of lokum, written for a cook who already knew what boiled sugar should look like. The apothecary weights and the missing acid are the two things to sort out before starting.
- DrachmsAn apothecaries' drachm is 60 grains, 1/8 of an apothecaries' ounce, about 3.9 g, so 65 drachms of starch is roughly 250 g (about 9 oz). The "25 drachms of water" added later comes to about 3 fl oz, a small correction to the paste rather than a real ingredient; treat it as a splash to loosen the mixture if it stiffens too fast.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in a solid cone, chipped and crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight: 2 1/2 lb is about 1.1 kg, and 1 3/4 pints is 3 1/2 cups of water.
- The missing acidMost lokum recipes include lemon juice or cream of tartar in the syrup. Some of the sucrose needs to invert if the finished squares are not to turn grainy on standing. Roughly a teaspoon of lemon juice per pound of sugar is a common proportion.
- Take the syrup to a temperature"When it is clear" is not a stage; clarity happens well before the syrup is concentrated enough. Boil to 240F, the soft-ball stage, before the starch slurry goes in, or the finished sweet will never set firm.
- Cook the paste far longer than implied"Stir until the sugar has become a thick paste" hides the real work: the starch and syrup need 45 to 60 minutes over low heat, stirred often, to go from opaque white to translucent gold. Stop early and the centre tastes of raw starch and stays cloudy.
- StarchCornstarch is what most modern recipes use and it behaves well here. Slurry it in cold water and pour it into the syrup in a thin stream while stirring, or it will seize into lumps that never dissolve.
- Pans and cuttingOil the pan, then line it with oiled parchment; a poured inch of lokum grips bare metal stubbornly. Leave it uncovered at room temperature overnight before cutting with an oiled knife.
- Dusting and storagePowdered sugar alone draws moisture out of the squares and turns to syrup. Use half powdered sugar, half cornstarch, and keep the boxes at room temperature -- refrigeration makes lokum weep.
- YieldThe recipe says "pans", plural, and the quantity bears that out: it will fill more than one 8- or 9-inch square pan to a depth of an inch, for something on the order of 3 1/2 to 4 lb of finished sweets.
Lokum -- from the Arabic rahat al-hulkum, "comfort of the throat" -- is an Ottoman confection built on the same principle as much older starch-and-honey sweets from the eastern Mediterranean, remade once cheap refined sugar became available in Istanbul. The Hacı Bekir confectionery, founded in the city in the late eighteenth century, is traditionally credited with popularising the modern version, and British travellers are generally said to have carried it home in the nineteenth century under the name Turkish delight, by which point it was a fashionable and expensive import. That expense is the point of the opening line here: the appeal to "the sweetmeats of the harem" is the standard orientalist framing of turn-of-the-century travel cookery, selling the reader an exotic provenance along with a recipe that is, in the end, boiled sugar and cornstarch.