lokum is the sweetmeat known as Turkish Delight in English. It is a thick, transparent jelly made of starch, sugar, water, and a wide variety of flavorings, such as fruits, nuts, mastic, and rosewater. When set, it is cut into cubes and sprinkled with a mixture of powdered sugar and starch. “Lokum” is a corruption of the original name rahatü’l-hulkum (ease to the throat), a figure of speech used to describe sweet, soft, and delicious foods as early as the tenth century, when the Arab writer Badi’ al-Zamān al-Hamādhāni (969–1008) applied it to a type of marzipan. The expression was used during the Ottoman period for a pudding called pelte (from the Persian pâlûda, meaning “refined”), consisting of the starch-thickened juice of grapes or other fruits. Lokum developed in the eighteenth century as a very thick version of pelte. Although it has been suggested that lokum developed much earlier from ‘Abbāsid versions of pelte (fâlûdhaj) recorded in the tenth century, these recipes all contain oil or butter and produce not a sweet resembling lokum but a chewy toffee of the type also known as sabuniyya.
