My Fight with Turkish Delight

"The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious." (44)

It all started out so well....

Here is something I have observed. There are loads cookbooks in my house and in none of them have I ever come across a page in which the author presents us with a recipe that they describe as hard to do. It’s step by step and gives the impression that if you follow those instructions there is no way you can go wrong...right?  

Wrong!

Here is another observation. What if you look in two different cookbooks and they both give you the perfect recipe for the same thing but some of the ingredients are different. The outcome should still be exactly the same...right?

Wrong!

I looked at lots of different recipes for Turkish Delight and came across lots of different versions. Some said use gelatin, some said cream of tartar. I followed the cream of tartar rout as it was apparently more traditional. I followed the steps perfectly, they were pretty much the same in every recipe I'd seen. I Left it to set for 24 hours and when I came back to it, it had taken a turn for the worse.

It had refused to set properly and the last thing I imagined when I read the scene from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was the White Witch handing Edmund a box of Turkish Delight that turns to mush in seconds.

I had to relent and remake the mixture adding gelatin and getting rid my precious idea of staying traditional. So I sucked it up and shouted “FOR NARNIA” while I added what was required in a truly over dramatic moment.  

Another 24 hours later and I still have this.

Maybe the moral of this is don’t trust the internet. Yet I looked at a great deal of recipes that had been said to have worked fine. That got me thinking, before I wrote this I seriously considered going out to buy some Turkish Delight from the shop or making jelly and covering it in icing sugar and pretending that everything had worked out fine. What if, the recipes I looked at online had done the same thing? Or got it from a cookbook and just posted without trying it? Maybe I just did something wrong both times. Or maybe not.

My point is, despite how closely you follow the recipe, it sometimes just doesn’t work out for you. You can either keep going, cheat or give up as I have. 

That is something you don’t see documented in cookbooks. They want to give you the image of the best results you can get. They don’t want to show you the previous five attempts they made that burnt or fell apart. Failure is not going to sell their book. 

There is a reason that sales of Turkish Delight went up increasingly in 2005 when Disney’s film adaptation of the book came out. People didn’t want to try and make the historic sweet for themselves after the film made them curious. They just wanted to try it and move on. 

Tastes change over the years and Turkish Delight is definitely an acquired taste. You don’t want a failed tray full of the stuff like I currently have in my kitchen and it clearly isn’t as easy to make as it seems. The astounding amount of sugar in the recipe alone would have sent me into a hyperactive breakdown as a child. 

For Edmund during World War II where the novel is set, there was food rationing and sugary substances were a rare treat. To acquire some from the Witch would have been such a wonderful treat to him. 

Unfortunately I don’t have a magic bottle that contains mystic liquid that turns snow to rare sweets. So I am stuck with my rubbish version that currently looks more like the slush poured on TV presenters in the children’s Saturday morning shows I used to watch religiously. 

Oh well at least I tried. 

Sammy xx