Pişmaniye

Pişmaniye is a Turkish confection made by working flour roasted with fat into boiled-down sugar and finishing it as bundles of fine threads. It looks like white cotton, but when you bite into it the threads come apart, leaving the flavor of the roasted flour and butter. It differs in both ingredients and process from cotton candy, which is made by spinning melted sugar outward with centrifugal force.

Pişmaniye, with fine sugar threads visibly coming loose on the outside of the bundle as well. Photo: Source, Basak, CC BY-SA 4.0. Image not modified (downsized version from the hosting source).

Combining roasted flour with the work of pulling sugar

For pişmaniye, a sugar mass and a flour mixture are prepared separately. Sugar, water and a small amount of citric acid are heated and boiled down, cooled until the mass can be handled, and then pulled. Meanwhile, the flour is roasted with butter or another fat and likewise cooled to a temperature at which it can be worked by hand. Rather than simply mixing hot sugar with cold flour, the maker brings both to a matching state before moving on to the stretching.

In the version called Kırkbıyık in the Ankara region, the sugar is poured onto marble and pulled into a ring until it turns white. Next, the ring of sugar is placed around flour prepared on a large tray, then turned, pulled and folded over. The more this is repeated, the more fine threads form. A method in which two or three people work together has been recorded, and it calls for handwork that goes beyond repeating the same motion: keeping the thickness of the ring and the degree of pulling even.

Each time the sugar mass is pulled thinner, roasted flour containing fat adheres to its surface. As it takes in the flour and fat, the mass is divided into many fine threads. For the finish, one method cuts the long bundle, folds it in two and twists it. Pieces heaped up loosely and pieces gathered into short, compact shapes also differ in how they are shaped after the threads have been made.

A name that appears in poetry, a method preserved in cookbooks

Fibrous sweets also appear in the old food cultures of Persia and Anatolia. The Persian poet Bushak (also known as Abu Ishaq) wrote works about food, and among them is a line about eating halva of pashmak in his own workshop. It is a play on words that overlaps hallaj, the occupational name for a craftsman who fluffs cotton, with a cotton-like sweet. What the poem conveys is the name of the sweet and the pleasure of eating it; it is not a recette (the ingredient proportions and method) recording ingredients or how to pull it.

The cookbook of the 15th-century physician Şirvani contains an entry called Helva-yı pişmeni. The passage identified by the textual scholar Günay Kut is on folio 117 verso of the manuscript. The food historian Priscilla Mary Işın positions this cookbook as an early record of the method for making thread helva. The name of the sweet and how to make it had been set down in a book even before it became a souvenir sweet in İzmit.

The specific method of pulling is also described in detail in Aşçıbaşı by Mahmud Nedim bin Tosun, published in 1900. The flour is roasted in clarified butter; in a separate pan, sugar is boiled with water and adjusted with lemon. The syrup is dropped into water to check whether it has reached a stretchable state, then poured onto an oiled tray. The slightly cooled sugar is pulled several times, formed into a large ring and dusted with roasted flour. As several pairs of hands turn and widen the ring while adding flour little by little, it eventually separates into fine threads. The same book lists this tel helva as a specialty of Bayburt.

Rings of honey, and helva pressed firm

Some Anatolian thread helvas vary the sugar ingredient or the finish. Alanya’s Külük Helvası is made by boiling down honey and forming it into a ring. Flour and butter are roasted in a separate pan, taking care not to let them darken too much, and dusted onto the honey ring. Once the ring has been pulled wide, it is twisted into a figure eight, folded over and pulled again. This is repeated while the flour is worked in, and the bundle, now fine, is torn off by hand and squeezed into sticks to finish. The city’s regional cookbook lists three ingredients: wheat flour, honey and butter.

Çekme helva from Kastamonu in the Black Sea region is distinctive for the processing after pulling. After miyane, roasted flour combined with fat, has been worked into the sugar, the finished helva is broken down further, packed into a tray and compressed, and shaped into squares, diamonds, cylinders and other forms. Though it looks densely packed, it crumbles apart when bitten. What sets it apart from the kinds in which the threads are heaped up loosely is not whether there is a pulling step, but that after pulling it is crushed and pressed into shape.

The specification for Kastamonu’s geographical indication emphasizes the skill of bringing the temperatures of the miyane and the white pulled sugar close together and mixing them evenly. If the states of the sugar and the flour do not match, a smooth texture will not form. Also, if it absorbs moisture, it loses its crumbly texture and becomes hard, and eventually sticky. Keeping it dry is also part of the work of protecting the texture of the threads that have been made.

The communal pulling of thread helva also became one of the pleasures of winter gatherings. In the examples from Sivas and Afyonkarahisar recorded by Işın, riddles, songs and conversation go on while people gather around a tray making the sweet. It was a sweet in which the time spent making it was itself shared with guests, before the finished product was divided up.

Amasya in northern Turkey has a similar sweet, teltel. In the province’s cookbook, the work of forming boiled-down sugar into a ring, combining it with roasted flour, stretching it and folding it in two is repeated. It is introduced as a sweet for welcoming many guests in winter, pulling it together and eating it. Its makers also describe how it differs from pişmaniye, so the two cannot be lumped together as the same thing.

How it became a sweet of İzmit

Pişmaniye is found across Anatolia, but İzmit, at the eastern end of the Sea of Marmara, is well known as a place renowned for it. Selling boxed pişmaniye to travelers has become part of the town’s souvenir scene.

In the lineage of craftsmen handed down in Kocaeli, Hayri Usta from Kandıra is named as an early master. Commercial production was advanced by Hacı Agop, an Armenian confectioner who learned from him. It is further said that İbrahim Çınar, who regularly visited the shop to teach Turkish to Agop’s son, learned the method, made it full-time after retiring, and was responsible for spreading it in İzmit. This is a local lineage of production and dissemination, not a story that settles who invented the sweet as a whole.

“İzmit Pişmaniyesi” is registered as a Turkish geographical indication. The registration date in the registry is May 21, 2002, and the number is 34. The registration of a product bearing the place name and the history of pişmaniye as a sweet found in many places run on separate timelines.

A name resembling wool, and wordplay about regret

Kocaeli tradition links the sweet’s lineage to the Persian peşmek. The Persian word pashmak is known as a name describing a wool-like appearance. The Dehkhoda Dictionary treats pashmak as a diminutive of the word meaning wool, and also gives the sense of a sweet that is pulled many times to make it like hair or wool and that separates into white threads. It is not merely a later metaphor based on appearance; the form of the word and its meaning as a food are linked within the dictionary.

The current dictionary of the Turkish Language Association connects the etymology of pişmaniye to the Persian peşimān and an Arabic suffix. Views differ among dictionaries and traditions on its relationship to the Persian sweet that bears the name of wool, and on how to explain the form of the modern Turkish name.

Because the name sounds like the Turkish word for “regret,” there is a play on words: those who make it regret it and those who don’t make it regret it; those who buy it regret it and those who don’t buy it regret it too. It overlays onto the same word both the difficulty of making it, where a mistake in pulling ruins the whole batch however much effort has gone in, and the disappointment of failing to buy it while traveling. It lives on as a joke that conveys how hard it is to make, but the wordplay itself cannot serve as proof of how the name came about.

Tel helva is a name tied to thread, and çekme helva a name tied to the act of pulling. These varied names, too, reflect the finely separated form and the handwork that produces it.

Glossary