Talkysh Kaleve

Talkysh Kaleve (Талкыш кәләвә) is a Tatar sweet made by pulling a honey-and-sugar candy, combining it with flour toasted in fat to form fine threads, and packing the threads into small molds. It is known in Tatarstan, including Kazan, and is shaped into small, pale cones or pyramid-like forms. Although it holds its shape, the inside is not a single piece of hard candy but a mass of fine, brittle threads.

Making the candy and the toasted flour separately

Making talkysh kaleve requires two components with different properties. One is a candy made by boiling down honey, sugar and water. The other is alba (альба), made by toasting flour in clarified butter. In the method recorded by the Tatar Cultural Resource Center, the butter is melted and the flour is added a little at a time while stirring until the mixture is uniform. It is cooked until fat appears on the surface and the mixture develops a nutty flavor and color.

The candy is boiled down in a separate pan, transferred to an oiled plate and left to cool. However, it is not left to cool until it is completely hard. Once it has cooled enough to handle but can still be stretched, it is pulled, folded in half and pulled again, over and over. The candy, brown at first, turns into a white, glossy, stretchy mass.

The candy is then moved onto the alba and stretched further. Pulling it thin together with layers of flour and fat turns the single mass into what looks like a bundle of unraveled threads. Boiling down the candy, toasting the flour and pulling the candy while it is still warm follow one after another. Simply mixing the ingredients and pouring them into a mold would not produce the same structure.

Bringing the threads together again after pulling

The threads of talkysh kaleve are not always served as one large bundle. The fine threads, which have become brittle, are spread out on a work surface and pressed with the fingers into cups or small purpose-made molds. When a mold is turned over and lifted off, a small mound with a wide base remains. The finished sweets are transferred to a lidded container and chilled.

A sweet with a cotton-like texture may bring to mind cotton candy, which is made by spinning melted sugar in a machine, but here the main technique is pulling by hand. Combining the candy with toasted flour and butter and finally pressing the threads into molds together create the honey aroma, the crumbly texture and the distinctive shape.

Figure: Vyacheslav Kirillin, April 22, 2024, at an Arsky District cultural event in Kazan. The photo shows that threads remain even in the molded sweet. CC BY-SA 4.0, unmodified. Original image and rights statement／License.

A family story about a craftsman who returned from Turkey

This sweet has a story connected with Borhan Safiullin, the founder of the Safiullin family. According to the family’s account, Borhan was taken prisoner in Turkey in the late 19th century and helped out at a confectionery shop there. The shop owner arranged a ticket home for him, and after returning to Kazan, Borhan is said to have created a sweet using honey, sugar, clarified butter, flour and water, based on the methods for several sweets he had learned in Turkey.

This story has been passed down as family history told in 2014 by his great-grandson, Niyaz Safiullin. In 2019, Niyaz, together with his wife Ravilya, also told a reporter covering their workshop that after returning home, Borhan married a local cook and experimented with the sweet while delivering food to wealthy households in Kazan.

The name of the cook Yunus Akhmetzhanov appears in the account of how the method was preserved for later generations. Akhmetzhanov compiled a cookbook of Tatar cuisine and is said to have written down the method from Borhan’s daughter Fakhira in the 1950s. According to Niyaz, Fakhira did not teach it to him right away; only after Akhmetzhanov shared his recipe for homemade noodle soup did she reveal how to make her family’s sweet. Not only proportions written on paper but also the hands-on techniques of each family’s cooking were exchanged.

From a household sweet to makers across the region

Talkysh kaleve is also tied to serving tea to guests in an era when honey and sugar were precious. According to Niyaz and his wife, clarified butter and honey were expensive, and the sweet was once found in wealthy Kazan households. The family also remembers a time when the threads were not packed into molds but were pinched off a large bundle a little at a time and eaten with tea. During the shortages of wartime and the postwar years, it came to be made to order for people who could supply the ingredients, and there were reportedly periods when it was not sold at all. In the early 1990s, descendants of the Safiullin family began mass production, and the sweet once again became widely available to buy.

The tradition is not carried on by one family alone. In Atninsky District, there is a maker who learned the craft from their grandmother, and production has spread throughout Tatarstan as well as to Ufa and Orenburg. What these makers have in common is less a list of ingredients than the skill of pulling the candy quickly while watching its temperature and shaping the fine threads before they break apart too much. Each small, uniform piece goes through two stages: making the candy and the alba in separate pans, and packing the threads into molds on the work surface.

Glossary