Turkish Delight

With most classic dishes, the precise origin story is lost in the mists of history. With Turkish delight we can actually put a date on it. In the year 1777, a bunch of British businessmen visiting Istanbul gave the name to a sticky sweet they discovered in the shop of a cook named Bekir. He was calling it lokum, which was his abbreviation of an Arab phrase meaning ‘throat relaxant’.

He told them he had created it when the sultan put out the word to confectioners tha