Hello, Snackers. What candy could make you betray your family? Please discuss.
Your parents warn you about this. Don’t take candy—or any food, really—from people you don’t know. The Snow Queen almost killed Snow White with a poisoned apple; Alice got very tall and then very small when consuming a beverage and snack of unknown origin; modern urban legends are filled with tales of Bad Guys offering candy to kids. Stranger danger—it’s a thing.
All of this is to say that Edmund Pevensie, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, perhaps should have known better than to accept a box of Turkish Delight offered by the Queen in Narnia. (Quick recap, no spoilers: the Queen is actually the cruel and cunning White Witch, who encounters Edmund and literally conjures up the box of candy; he “shovels” it into his mouth because the Queen has secretly used her magic to make it horribly addictive; when he asks for more, she tells him she’ll give it to him after he brings his siblings to her. Here’s the full text.) To be fair to Edmund, everything about this place was unfamiliar. When your household furniture leads you to a magical world with talking animals and other incomprehensible enchantments, of course you won’t immediately understand who’s who and how anything works.
I’ll leave the broader discussions of the novel (its underlying meaning, C.S. Lewis’s personal beliefs, etc.) to the bookworms and scholars, because I recall very little of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’ve read it once, about 30 years ago, and I watched the BBC miniseries around the same time.
What I do remember, more than anything, is the Turkish Delight. I remember that Edmund loved it so much that he was willing to betray his family. I remember wanting to try it myself because Wow, that stuff must be delicious. I remember finally trying it, years later, on a trip to the UK. And I remember recoiling because it tasted horrible, like a chewy piece of soap.
I’m not the only one to experience this exact sequence of intrigue and excitement followed by disappointment. It’s been a point of discussion on one of my favorite podcasts and in the comic xkcd and pops up regularly on social media. Here are a few posts from the past week on the website I will always call Twitter. Note that none of these people are talking to each other—they’re independently musing about the same thing.
So…some questions. Why have so many people gone through the same steps and come to the same conclusion? Is it a modern phenomenon fueled by the internet—a meme of sorts—or have people always had this experience with Turkish Delight? Also … who, exactly, is having this experience? Is it shared across cultures?
What’s going on here, exactly?
Let’s start by considering how C.S. Lewis (probably) understood Turkish Delight. Food writer Cara Strickland investigated this very topic for Jstor Daily back in 2016, noting that candy would have been a wartime treat for both the characters in the book and Lewis himself (the novel was published in 1950 and set in 1940).
Lewis, unlike Edmund, experienced wartime rationing. On July 26, 1942, confectionery was added to the list of items that required coupons from a ration book along with money to purchase. …
It makes sense that Turkish delight would have been on Lewis’s brain as he crafted a book where Christmas features as a main theme. In Narnia, it is “always winter but never Christmas,” a product of the White Witch’s evil magic. It makes sense to draw a parallel between this dismal fantasy and the stark realities of wartime. Rationing extended to timber, which made Christmas trees harder to come by, and confectionery rationing didn’t end until February of 1953—still well before the end of sugar rationing later that year. When the White Witch asks Edmund what he’d like best to eat, it’s entirely possible that Lewis was answering for him: the candy that would be most difficult and expensive to obtain. Edmund isn’t just asking the witch for candy, he’s essentially asking her for Christmas, too.
Strickland also notes that Lewis may have chosen Turkish Delight rather than other candy because it seemed especially exotic, like Narnia itself. If you find yourself in an unfamiliar but dazzling realm, why not request a food that, in your mind, offers the same kind of energy? You also wouldn’t go to Willy Wonka’s factory and ask for a normal peanut butter cup. Eat the treat that matches the mood.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950. If you look through newspaper archives and the like, you don’t see much of anything about Turkish Delight for a couple of decades. That changes when you get to April 1979, when CBS aired a prime-time, made-for-television adaptation of the book, in collaboration with the Episcopal Church and the food company Kraft.
There’s a lot to process here. There are plenty of religious overtones to the Narnia series, including this book, so you can understand the logic of the Episcopal Church advocating for it (even if, presumably, CBS no longer commissions movies based on suggestions from religious groups). Even so, at first glance, that feels like a random trio of collaborators. Why not the Presbyterian Church and Gillette? Or Lutherans and [spins wheel…] Vail Ski Resort? “Come to Vail and experience a winter wonderland with 5,000 acres of ski trails and, at last count, zero evil witches.”
A quick scan through the newspaper archives sheds some light on why Kraft was part of this endeavor. For starters, it was a way to attach their name to a Media Event. It’s hard to overstate the amount of promotion for the movie, which included a massive insert that ran in newspapers around the country and contained all kinds of information including the movie script.
But Kraft also got more specific in its own marketing efforts, promoting its products through recipes that ran in newspaper food sections. Count the brand mentions!
We’ve got Miracle Whip. We’ve got mustard. We’ve got Kraft Singles. We’ve got Squeeze Parkay margarine. We’ve got orange marmalade. We’ve got marshmallows, which you will need to make your, uh, “White Witches Delight.”
I didn’t find any reactions to these foods—no quotes extolling the “Marmalade Surprise Muffins” or contemplating the chewiness of the marshmallow candy—but I think it’s fair to say that the version of Turkish Delight here might not measure up to the real stuff.
In 2005, the filmmakers were back at it again. Inspired in part by the success of the Harry Potter movies, Hollywood got to work on a new version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It was released in 2005, and once again there were recipe tie-ins, although most of them appear to have been developed not by international corporations but by journalists on the eternal quest for timely content.
Disney circulated its own recipe to church youth groups, in hopes of promoting the movie—a slightly curious choice, when you think about it, given that the candy pretty obviously represents temptation and sin, but you can understand the thought process. “Kids love candy!” the executives clearly thought, but … not this candy, it turned out.
This period, around the launch of the movie, appears to be when the “Turkish Delight is terrible” talking point started to spread across the UK and the USA. It showed up again and again in letters to the editor and newspaper columns, like this one by the Boston Globe’s Louise Kennedy:
The thing to remember here is that Turkish Delight was new to most Americans, who seem to be the ones doing the most complaining. After the movie came out, one Detroit retailer reporting a 400% increase in sales. When you have that many people trying a food for the first time, after seeing it hyped in a Hollywood blockbuster, of course a segment of them won’t like it, and of course some of the not-a-fans will complain loudly.
But somehow, those complaints stuck in the broader cultural conversation. At some point in the last twenty years, without anyone really noticing it, “Turkish Delight is bad” became received wisdom and a quiet internet meme.
As with so much collective griping, though, the complaints aren’t really fair, because many of them aren’t based on a full understanding of the topic at hand.
Here is the most common “Turkish Delight” in the UK and, I’m pretty sure, the USA. This is the Turkish Delight that made me gag.
But if you go to Turkey itself, and try lokum—the candy’s original name—you’ll find something different:
Lokum has been around since the 18th century, giving candymakers plenty of time to perfect their recipes without a single Kraft product. It’s widely available—meaning there’s real competition for the best versions—and while I haven’t been to Turkey myself, I have it on good authority that the lokum there is genuinely delicious.
Looking at those two photos reminds me of the time I went to a Tex-Mex restaurant in Berlin. The salsa was mostly mayo and the chicken was alarmingly undercooked. Nothing had any seasoning aside from an alarming sense of the uncanny. The menu called my food “tacos” and it looked kinda-sorta like the ones I loved from the taquerias back home in the States. And yet.
Perhaps I don’t like lokum—it’s possible. But I’ve also only tried it once and, like tacos, there’s a whole world of options out there, including some that I’m certain would blow my mind. We live in our own magic world these days, one of modernity and instant communication and internet retail. Even if we don’t live in Turkey, we don’t have to settle for a Kraft-developed recipe or a product mass-produced by a giant corporation. That’s not what the White Witch gave to Edmund—she got him the good stuff, and I’m resolving to seek out the same (paying for it with my credit card, not my family).
BEFORE YOU GO
Don’t forget to check the archives for more food history.
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— Doug Mack