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Turkish Delight, or lokum, is a popular dessert sweet throughout Europe, especially in Greece, the Balkans, and of course Turkey. But most Americans, if they have any association with the treat at all, know it only as the food for which Edmund Pevensie sells out his family in the classic children's fantasy novel The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Until I first tried real Turkish Delight in my 20s, I had always imagined it as a cross between crisp toffee and halvah–flaky and melting in the mouth. Here's what it really is: a starch and sugar gel often containing fruit or nuts and flavored with rosewater, citrus, resin, or mint. The texture is gummy and sticky, some of the flavors are unfamiliar to American palates, and the whole thing is very, very sweet. (In addition to the sugar in the mixture, it's often dusted with icing sugar to keep the pieces from sticking together.) While some Turkish Delight newbies may find they enjoy it, it's not likely to be the first thing we imagine when we picture an irresistible candy treat. I figured other people who had encountered Narnia before they encountered lokum probably had misconceptions just like mine, so I set out to discover what Americans imagined when they read about Turkish Delight. What kind of candy did we think would inspire a boy to betray his brothers and sisters? The English name, Turkish Delight, is no misnomer. Turks make and consume lots of lokum, and it's a popular gift, a sign of hospitality. The candy was invented in the early 19th century, reportedly by confectioner Bekir Effendi–though this claim comes from the company Hacı Bekir, still a premiere manufacturer of lokum, which was founded by Effendi and named after him. (He changed his name to Hacı Bekir after completing the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.) According to the Hacı Bekir website, Sultan Mahmud II was so pleased by the new sweet that he named Effendi chief confectioner. But outside of countries where Turkish Delight is a ubiquitous treat, many people first encounter it via The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first installment of C.S. Lewis' beloved Narnia books (or via the 1988 TV miniseries, or the 2005 movie). In the book, Edmund is tempted by Turkish Delight into an alliance with the White Witch, who has brought eternal winter to Narnia. When Edmund first meets the witch, she asks him "what would you like best to eat?" He doesn't even hesitate. England's wartime sugar rationing probably figured into that choice. The reason the Pevensie children were staying in an old house with a portal to Narnia in its wardrobe was that it was World War II, and kids were being relocated due to bombing risks. Candy, too, was a casualty of the war. During WWII, and well into the postwar period, sugar was strictly rationed in England; in 1950, when Lewis published the first Narnia book, the allowance was half a pound of candy and chocolate per person per month. It's no wonder that, when the White Queen asked him what he liked best, Edmund's answer was a confection that is almost entirely sugar. Most Americans, though, didn’t know about that when we first read the book. All we knew was that Turkish Delight was an exotic-sounding treat that would be your first request if a mysterious and elegant woman asked you, "what would you like best to eat?" And we knew that Edmund loved that Turkish delight so much that he put his siblings and the entire land of Narnia in harm's way in exchange for more. (To be fair, it was enchanted. But still, Edmund. Still.) So we wound up imagining whatever we would have liked best. It was like looking into Harry Potter's Mirror of Erised, but for desserts: when you thought of a treat worth betraying your family for, what did you see? Turkish Delight was our collective candy id. I asked my friends and acquaintances what they'd imagined when they first read about Turkish Delight. Their answers spanned a whole range of sweet treats – and some surprises. My friends who grew up in England empathized with Edmund. Adrian Bott was born long after sugar rationing, but still got positively poetic in recalling the treat: "Rose-hued irregular cubes dusted silvery with icing sugar, arrayed on a doily in gentle disarray like a toppled Stonehenge. Edmund's temptation was entirely understandable and one rather felt that in his place, one could hardly have done other than he did." (Bott is a children's author, if you couldn't tell.) For kids who weren't already familiar with it, though, "Turkish Delight" was likely to be meaningless – which meant we could project onto it whatever confection seemed most delicious. "I imagined it was better and more sophisticated than anything I had ever tasted, considering that Edmund was willing to sacrifice his entire family for just one more piece," said Coco Langford, who described her childhood vision of Turkish Delight as "rich, but still delicate, chewy and soft, probably like some kind of vanilla or caramel fudge, with just enough nuts to add the perfect crunch." Kelly Taylor assumed that Turkish Delight was similar to her favorite sweet: "I remember at age 8 thinking that it would be like something nutty and chocolatey – my favorite candy bar at that age was a ‘Watchamacallit,' sort of a crunchy peanut-buttery chocolate bar thing." Having found the actual Turkish Delight "boring, bordering on gross," Taylor says she still imagines the Narnia version as "fluffy crunchy nutty chocolatey goodness." Clarice Meadows thought it was chocolate, too: "not just any old chocolates but serious dark chocolate truffle chocolates that give you an extreme rush of endorphins." Not everyone thought the Ultimate Candy would be chocolate, though. Stefanie Gray pictured "a way fancier and differently textured old-school version of the pink Starburst" (the best Starburst, as everyone knows). Jaya Saxena also thought it was pink, "maybe some sort of frothy pink beverage that tasted just crazy." And Claire McGuire only cared that it was very, very sweet: "I was so sugar-deprived as a kid that my idea of the ideal sweet, one you'd betray your family for, was basically pure sugar with some pleasing texture. Maybe like nougat, only softer."
