Lokum

Lokum is a Turkish sugar confection made by heating sugar, starch and water to give it a soft, springy elasticity. It is well known as small cut cubes coated in powder, and it may be flavored with rose or citrus, or have pistachios or hazelnuts added. Even when it is translucent like jelly, what gives it its basic form is not gelatin but cooked starch.

Lokum with nuts, in cubes and in rolls, laid out side by side. The cut faces and the powder on the outside show how the interior and the surface are made differently. Photo: Source, Yasinuslu34, Public domain (rights waived by the author). Image not modified (downsized version from the hosting source).

An example of mint lokum (from a confectionery shop in Berlin, 2014; location of photo unknown). Photo: c.berlin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Turning a sweet liquid into a softness that can be cut

When heated with water, starch swells and makes the liquid viscous. For lokum, a liquid dense with sugar is cooked while being stirred, transferred to a mold, left to rest and then cut. The sweetness of the syrup combines with the cohesion created by the starch to give a texture that holds the shape of each piece yet breaks down softly in the mouth.

When acid is added, citric acid, tartaric acid or similar is used. What is added, and at what stage, including flavorings and nuts, varies according to the maker’s recette (the ingredient proportions and method). Even when the same sweetener is used, the mechanism that holds its shape differs from that of hard candy, which sets sugar alone, or pişmaniye, in which sugar is pulled into fine threads.

The powder on the surface is not only a sweet decoration; it also helps keep cut faces from sticking to one another. Because the pieces can be divided while the inside stays soft, many flavors can be lined up in the same box. Pistachio lokum adds the sensation of biting into the nuts, while rose-flavored lokum carries the fragrance in the smooth paste itself. Beyond the exterior color and the amount of nuts, the softness of the confection’s paste also differs from product to product.

Lokum’s texture also changes with the ratio of sugar, starch and water. A study comparing four different formulations found that hardness and elasticity already differed at the time of making, and that during storage hardness and adhesiveness tended to increase while elasticity decreased. Even when the same three ingredient names are listed, the texture is not necessarily the same.

In another production study, starch, sugar, water and citric acid were heated, then poured into molds and rested at 25°C for 48 hours. A stage in which the starch is cooked in a dense syrup to create cohesion is followed by a stage in which the mass is cooled and brought to a state that can be cut. The hot mass that has just finished cooking is not yet the finished cube.

Two lines of origin, and how starch is used

Theories about the forerunner of lokum include one linking it to louk, a medieval Arab preparation combining honey or sugar with fruit, resins and other ingredients, and another holding that it developed from paluze, an Ottoman sweet starch dish. The food historian Özge Samancı explains these two as separate views on its origin. That sweets with similar ingredients existed earlier is not the same event as the present-day cubed lokum being invented all at once.

The name rahat-ul hulkum appears in 17th-century sources, and an 18th-century Ottoman recette also describes adding wheat starch to a syrup of white sugar and water and cooking it. Before the refinement and supply of ingredients changed in the 19th century, the technique of combining starch with a sweet syrup was already in use.

The Hacı Bekir shop and changing ingredients

A name often mentioned in the history of lokum is Hacı Bekir, a confectionery shop in Istanbul. Its founder, Bekir Efendi, moved from Araç in Kastamonu and opened the shop in Bahçekapı in 1777. The work passed to his successor, Mehmet Muhiddin, and then to Ali Muhiddin after him, and the shop’s name spread along with its deliveries to the Ottoman court.

Leyla Celaliyan, the sixth generation of the shop, says that old lokum was sweetened with honey or pekmez and bound with wheat flour. According to this explanation handed down in the family, once refined sugar and starch came into use, it moved closer to its present form, pale in color and translucent. The change in ingredients is remembered as something that altered not only the sweetness but also the color and texture.

1777 is the year the shop was founded, which is not the same as the year all lokum was invented. Even in the testimony of the same family, the sweet itself is regarded as a food known from earlier. Rather than a story that leads back to a single inventor, in which it was suddenly invented for a ruler who wanted a soft sweet, what can be seen is a process in which an existing confection changed through its ingredients and commercial production.

A sweet cooled and cut, as described in an 1844 cookbook

Mehmed Kâmil’s Melceü’t-Tabbâhîn is a cookbook published in Istanbul in 1844. Its rahat-ul hulkum calls for mixing starch little by little into fine-quality sugar boiled in water. It instructs constant stirring so that no lumps form and nothing sticks to the bottom of the pan.

Rose water and musk are used for fragrance, and the cooked mass is poured onto a tray greased with almond oil. Once cool, it is cut into pieces of the desired size and dusted with a powder of starch and sugar to keep the pieces from sticking together. Another method also oils the scissors before cutting. The procedure of binding with starch, cooling, and coating the cut faces with powder is already set out concretely in a 19th-century cookbook.

The strong fragrance of musk is not the same as today’s wide range of fruit and nut flavors. Even as the flavorings have changed, there is continuity in the procedure of cutting a sticky confection into small pieces to handle it.

Names that continue beyond “Turkish delight”

In English it is called Turkish delight. Among older Turkish names is the form rahat-ul hulkum, linked to “comfort of the throat.” Explanations of the etymological relationship between the short name lokum and this long name differ, but it spread to many places as a name indicating a soft mouthfeel.

In 1835, Friedrich Unger, court confectioner to the King of Greece, traveled to Istanbul, studied its confectionery and helva shops, and also visited the confectionery kitchens of Topkapı Palace. His book published in 1838 included four methods related to lokum. Even when European confectioners had the chance to learn the ingredients, it was difficult to reproduce from a short written description everything down to how far to cook the mixture and how to move the hands. The spread of lokum also shows that the transmission of a name and ingredients was a separate matter from mastering the work of creating its soft texture.

In regions including former Ottoman territories, it is eaten under similar names, such as loukoumi in Greek and ratluk or rahat in the Balkans. In Geroskipou, Cyprus, there is also a product with a geographical indication, Loukoumi Geroskipou. The application specification for this local product, published in 2007, lists as a distinguishing feature that it uses no glucose and no gelatin. Sugar and citric acid are added to water and boiled, then cornstarch dispersed in cold water is added, the mixture is stirred for a long time, flavorings or nuts are added, and it is poured into box-shaped molds. Once cool, it is cut into rectangular blocks and coated with sugar or desiccated coconut.

The local production history is tied to a lineage that began when Sofoklis Athanasiou opened a shop in 1895 and passed the work on to his family. The history of the workshop described in the application specification shows a history of production carried on in Cyprus, separate from a history that explains every region through a single shop in Istanbul.

Festive hospitality, and today’s workshop

Lokum is one of the sweets served to guests at Ramazan Bayramı, the festival marking the end of the month of fasting. A confection that can be cut into small pieces suits occasions when people visit relatives and neighbors and hand out sweets to children. In everyday life it may also accompany coffee, and it exists both packed into gift boxes and served one piece at a time.

At today’s Hacı Bekir, the process once carried out by stirring copper pans over an open flame by hand now uses sealed steel kettles and mixers. Even so, craftspeople are said to be involved in deciding when to move on to the next stage. Some tasks can be left to machines, while others remain human work, such as judging when the cooking is done. It is not cut immediately after being poured into molds; the soft piece is completed only through the whole process, including resting it before shaping.

Glossary