Inseparable bayram duo: Kahve & lokum

Now that the sweetest holiday has started, it’s time for sweets of all kinds, all to go along with little cups of bitter Turkish coffee. The true essence of the Ramadan holiday is an endless chain of visits, and serving coffee with sweet morsels of delight is a must. In my childhood, Eid al-Fitr was called “Şeker Bayramı,” that can be translated as “Sugar or Candy Feast or Holiday” nowadays with the waves of a more religious attitude it is called “Ramazan Bayramı,” the Ramadan Holiday. Bayram in Turkish is a word that refers to any holy day, but also covers any festivity or festival, or even commemoration days dedicated to celebrating any event or subject worth memorializing. It is time to exchange visits and at every Bayram visit there will be coffee served, and there will definitely be sweet treats, with Turkish coffee and Turkish delight being the classic duo of the sugar feast.

Nowadays, the urban white-collar generation seems to take Bayram as an opportunity to take a break from work and head to holiday destinations. People of rural origin take the opportunity to go to their villages to visit the elderly, of course if they are still living there. In any case, a Bayram, especially when it is a 9-day break opportunity, means that there will be a lot of traffic leaving metropoles like Istanbul. In the past, the traffic used to be across houses with endless reciprocal home visits. There used be an infinite succession of guests visiting my paternal mother’s house as she was the eldest in the whole family. My spinster aunts living with my grandmother would be busy brewing coffee and filling little dainty glasses of liquor to serve along with coffee and keeping an eye on the elaborate candy bonbonnieres to make sure that they are not emptied, probably by me. Even though being a very pious person, my grandmother would enjoy her sip of fruit liquors, especially the one with menthe or “vişne” sour cherry, perhaps it was not even considered as an alcoholic beverage but rather like a liquid confection. The visit always started with kissing the hand of the elderly, and when I kissed my grandmother’s hand, she would give me a few lumps of Turkish delight wrapped in a starched handkerchief embroidered with flowers and a single 2.5 lira coin. That was a lot of money for a child then. You could buy a lot of wafers sold in open boxes at the neighborhood grocery store, umbrella shaped chocolates or many sachets of chickpea powder. The children were also given tiny, miniscule Turkish delights that are called “bird’s delight” or “kuş lokumu” in Turkish. A bird’s delight would be of mixed flavors, and one would eat the tiny dice-sized delights one by one, guessing their taste from the green, pink, yellow and orange colors visible through the thin covering layer of starch powder. But I always had my eye on the “çifte kavrulmuş,” the double roasted ones, probably because I was fond of bitter flavors since childhood, I loved the slightly burnt taste of double roasted Turkish delight that was less sweet and more complex in flavor, and I adored its darker consistency and rubbery texture. I think I discovered the appealing combination of bitter and sweet with double roasted Turkish delight. Sadly, both the tiny fanciful “kuş lokumu” and the bittersweet “çifte kavrulmuş” are becoming rarer and rarer today, only classic confectioners seem to hold onto the tradition.

When coming to the inseparable duo of bitterness and sweetness, we strangely don’t know exactly whether the Turkish coffee as we know today was initially served with sugar or not. Today, you can have your Turkish coffee, without sugar “sade,” with medium sugar “orta,” or sweet, “şekerli,” offering a choice for the preference of each guest. But was coffee sweetened before? When coffee first arrived in Istanbul from Yemen, we do not know whether it was drunk black or with sugar. In fact, we don't know exactly whether the coffee was served with a creamy frothy foam on top as it is today. Coffee came to Istanbul after Egypt and Yemen were annexed to the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with the Battle of Ridâniye and must be initially served boiled in a pot and poured into individual cups, like the Arabic style coffee. The first coffee house in Istanbul was opened in mid-1550s, but it was not welcomed by the Topkapı Palace immediately as it was seen as suspicious or even makruh, just because the beans were roasted like coal, and burnt food was not acceptable. However, coffee spread inevitably with its alluring aroma, and in 1588, coffee artisans took part in the festivities for the circumcision wedding of Sultan Murad III’s son, Prince Mehmed, and that is an indication the coffee was accepted by the palace. However, there is no information on the purchase of coffee in the palace records at that time, but when it comes to the sugar issue, the first sign of coffee’s association with sugar comes strangely from the palace itself. According to information provided by historian Arif Bilgin, in the records of Topkapı Palace in the early 1600s, there is a record of the purchase of sugar for the Valide Sultan's coffee, that is for the Queen Mother. Strangely there is no record of the money spent on coffee. The Valide Sultan must have bought the coffee from her own budget or from the internal treasury. However, this information is an important indicator that coffee was drunk with sugar, at least that was the preference of the Queen mother.

Later on, since coffee was bitter, we see that it was served along with sweet delicacies such as jewel-like confitures and clotted cream “kaymak” or a piece of lokum. The origin of the word “lokum” is actually “rahatü”l-hulkum,” which means passing easily through the throat. Over time, it was pronounced as rahat lokum and latilokum, and then simply called lokum. The British, on the other hand, initially called it morsels of delight or lumps of delight, meaning morsels of delightful flavor. According to researcher Mary Işın, E.C.C. Baillie, a British female traveler who came to Izmir by ship in the 1870s, was the first to give these delicacies a Turkish connection and called them Turkish Delight. Coming back to having something sweet along with coffee, Arif Bilgin suggests that this duo of clotted cream & jam, kaymak & reçel in Turkish, which was enjoyed as a base before sipping the coffee, started the custom of having breakfast as we know it today. No wonder we call breakfast, “kahvaltı,” meaning simply before coffee or a base for coffee. As it is the time of the sweetest holiday, all we need is a piece of “lokum” with “kahve” now, and preferably first thing in the morning before breakfast.

Sip of the Week:

The original Turkish coffee probably tasted much different from the ones we taste today. I thought of that matter when I attended a coffee tasting at Café Nero last week. The first coffee tasted in Istanbul originated from Ethiopia. But then the coffee trade changed hands, coffee spread around the world, and the Ottomans lost the coffee trade to the Europeans— in fact, from the 1730s onwards, New World coffees dominated the Ottoman market. Today, the origins of coffee have become very diverse, we are at a point to re-think coffee flavors and even talk about it.

“Single Origin” coffees are not only from a single country, but from a single farm or plantation. The Rigoberto Franco Arroyave farm in the Antioquia region of Colombia, which we tasted last week, is produced exclusively for Caffè Nero. Colombian coffee tastes very different, having notes of toffee with black currant and hints of red apple. Now I dream of having my beans ground to fine powder-like consistency to make Turkish coffee, perhaps along with a morsel of cherry lokum, to create a new flavor duo for Bayram.