Turkish Delight

It seems appropriate to do the post on Turkish Delight in December, it being a snowy treat. In LWW,  Turkish Delight is, basically, a symbol of sin. It's how the White Witch tricks Edmund into giving her information about his siblings and is partly how she persuades him to betray them. I've been looking forward to this post  for a while; it's a fun one. But I knew I had to actually make Turkish Delight to have the authority to be able to write about it. And now I have!

For the recipe, I chose the simplest one (and consequently, most likely, the least authentic) I could find because I'm a novice at candy-making and I'm cheap so I didn't want a lot of hard to find or expensive ingredients. I found the recipe at Food.com. I didn't use rose water, whatever that is, or food coloring, again because I'm cheap. But if you want an easy recipe, that one is nearly fool-proof because I fumbled several of the directions and it still turned out edible and resembles actual Turkish Delight as you can see in the photo. 

Now let's get to the point. First, I'll let you read the book passage, and then I'll follow it with some thoughts on the subject.

The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle onto the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious. He was quite warm now, and very comfortable.

While he was eating the Queen kept asking asking him questions. At first Edmund tried to remember that it is rude to speak with one's mouth full, but soon he forgot about this and thought only of trying to shovel down as much Turkish Delight as he could, and the more he ate the more he wanted to eat, and he never asked himself why the Queen should be so inquisitive. She got him to tell her that he had one brother and two sisters, and that one of his sisters had already been in Narnia and had met a Faun there, and that no one except himself and his brother and his sisters knew anything about Narnia. She seemed especially interested in the fact that there were four of them, and kept on coming back to it. "You are sure there are just four of you?" she asked. "Two Sons of Adam and two Daughters of Eve, neither more nor less?" and Edmund, with his mouth full of Turkish Delight, kept on saying, "Yes, I told you that before," and forgetting to call her "Your Majesty," but she didn't seem to mind now. 

At last the Turkish Delight was all finished and Edmund was looking very hard at the empty box and wishing that she would ask him whether he would like some more. Probably the Queen knew quite well what he was thinking; for she knew though Edmund did not, that this was enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves. But she did not offer him any more.

She goes on to convince him to bring his siblings to her, continuing to use the Turkish Delight as a bait and also appealing to his pride, a conversation which I would love to include if it weren't so long. You'll have to just get the book and read it for yourself.

Now, the first few times I read this, I didn't think much about the Turkish Delight, because I'd never heard of it before but was able to gather that it was some sort of dessert, which was good enough for me. But there's always another layer deeper to dig. With my new familiarity to the confection, I can now see that Jack's choice of Turkish Delight was very deliberate. Following are five things I learned about Turkish Delight and its connection to sin. 

1. It's nothing more than lots and lots of sugar in gelatin form. Take a look at the ingredients of any TD recipe. There are different flavors and varieties, but there's really nothing redeemable as far as nutrients go. So even though it does taste good, it made me want to go eat some raw vegetables or a steak. Or to say it another way, if you were starving to death but had as much TD as you could eat, you would still die.
2. It's addicting. Yes, I am eating some while I write this. Mine is probably the worst TD in the world, but I still hear it calling to me whenever I put it away.
3. It's messy, messy, messy. The stuff is super sticky. I tend to make a bit of a mess when I cook anyway but between the gelatin part, which makes everything you touch sticky, and the powdered sugar, which as a friend of mine says is like the herpes of food, it makes a pretty big mess.
4. It sounds and looks better than it really is. 'Turkish Delight' sounds exotic and, well, delightful. And it looks good too. The powdered sugar makes it look all snowy and fanciful. But once you eat it, it's a little disappointing. I think this is what makes it addicting. Even though I know it's not that great and even a little sickening, I keep wanting to try more because maybe the next piece will be better. It plays tricks on my mind because it's appearance is so novel and whimsical which makes me keep wanting it, or wanting to want it, even though the actual experience isn't very gratifying and once it's finished will leave me with nothing but perhaps a sick stomach and cavities.
5. It's not worth selling out your siblings for. Which is exactly the point.
Now let's take those points and compare them to a specific example of sin. Say we'll use greed. Now let's be even more specific and say I really want an iPod touch. It's shiny and cool and has a bunch of sweet apps. And I just know it's going to make my life so much easier, I'll have more fun, it'll solve all my problems, etc. Even though I know deep down that I don't really need an iPod touch and that it won't really solve all my problems, I still have to have it. So after weeks of dreaming about it, I finally break down and buy it. It's great, I play with it constantly for the first few days and pretty regularly after that. But eventually, I start to notice it's short-falls more and more. It's running slower, I don't have all the memory space I need, and it's starting to glitch. Then the new version comes out. And it's so much faster, all the glitches were fixed and it's got enough new features to make mine look ancient. And even worse, when I put it down for long enough, I notice how much time it's been sucking out of my life that I've got nothing to show for but some high scores on Angry Birds. 
Now I'm not saying that having an iPod touch equals sin. But it can be if it steals too much of my time and money that should be going elsewhere. And this example works fairly well for several of my points. It doesn't really give many anything of lasting value. Or in other words, it's made of 'sugar' and doesn't have much 'nutritional value'. It's addicting -- anyone who's played Angry Birds or any game of the sort knows that. It looks better than it is. I felt like it could do anything, but in the end it was a disappointment and now I 'need' a new gadget. This particular case wasn't very 'sticky' but I'm sure you can think of another scenario where sin can get very sticky. Gossip, for example. It can seem harmless at first, but can spread and have unintended consequences and hurt people you didn't mean to hurt. And then there's the most important point. It's not worth it. None of the things we do to pursue things that go against what God wants for us are worth it. You see, God gave commandments not to make us follow a bunch of rules to keep us under his thumb and make our lives miserable, but because he knows what's good for us. We've been warned, but we keep eating the TD until we're sick and are always wanting more because it never fills us up. We'll keep eating it until we kill ourselves unless we learn to put it down and instead sit down to Aslan's feast of good hearty foods that never run out or go bad.