From syrup-drenched baklava to creamy milk puddings, Turkey has no shortage of sweet treats. But perhaps none have intrigued foreign visitors to Turkey as much as Turkish delight.

Lokum is famous in the English-speaking world as the enchanted confection that entices Edmund to join the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but in reality, the sticky sweet has been enchanting audiences since it was first developed in the early 1800s. Dubbed “Turkish delight” by English traders, lokum inspired a wave of imitators across Europe.

“Lokum predates gummy sweets – gummy sweets were made trying to replicate Turkish delight. They didn’t know the secret ingredient, which is to manage the pH level,” says Selim Cenkel, founder and usta at Marsel Delights.

“I want to take Levantine sweets – to take the whole category – and put my spin on it,” Selim says. “Make it more contemporary.”

With tousled curls of salt-and-pepper hair and distinctive round-framed glasses, Selim looks the part of a theoretical physicist rather than a pastry chef. But the mad-scientist persona is perhaps an apt description for Selim’s unconventional if not idiosyncratic approach to flavor combinations. His flavor pairings include mastika with mulberry, pomegranate with cumin, and sour cherry with almond and cinnamon. The combination of acidity, sweetness, and spice, held together by that elusive elastic texture, creates a complex and tantalizing taste experience.

“I get inspired from different areas of Turkish cuisine – from pastry, ice cream, cevizli sucuk [a candy popular in Turkey and Georgia made from walnuts, grape juice and flour], ” he says. Even with classic lokum flavors , Selim finds a way to put his own twist on it. “I use lemon with pistachios. Anybody can make pistachio lokum. This is a little more avant garde,” he says.

Selim also finds inspiration from childhood memories growing up in Istanbul’s Sephardic community.

“On Büyükada, we used to go to this patisserie, they made a cookie with a lokum inside – sort of an empanada. Like a Sephardic take on a traditional Turkish delight,” says Selim. Even Marsel Delight’s name, taken from Selim’s grandfather, is a tribute to Istanbul’s often-hidden minority communities. “Istanbul has so many multicultural backgrounds,” Selim says, pointing to the fact that for centuries Sephardic merchants introduced new goods to the Ottoman Empire and, later, the Republic of Turkey. “This intrigues me. I want to put this idea at the heart of the brand.”

Although Selim credits his Sephardic community for his curiosity and entrepreneurial drive, he admits he approaches lokum as an outsider. Most legacy lokum brands in Turkey are family-owned businesses and notoriously secretive about their process.

When first learning how to make lokum, the texture also proved the hardest part to master for Selim. “I started from a very personal, naive point of view,” he said. “It was a lot of trial and error.” After struggling to capture the elusive perfect texture, Selim sought advice from seasoned lokum experts.

The veteran lokum makers recommended making the mixture more acidic. “Each recipe creates a different chemistry and you have to anticipate that,” Selim says. “I calculate volume, pH, saturation and brix levels.”

Currently, Selim and a small team are making Marsel’s lokum at Maide Mutfak, a sort of coworking commercial kitchen in the backstreets of Şişli.  Selim’s technical approach has produced lokum with a light, springy texture, but his avant garde flavors have elicited a range of reactions.

“When you play with tradition, it’s a double edged sword,” Selim says.  “We respect the tradition but this is our take.” For the fans of traditional Turkish delight, the reception has been mixed. “They don’t take it well. They’re like ‘don’t touch my traditional lokum’,” he says. But Selim is less interested in disrupting legacy Turkish delight companies than he is introducing lokum to new audiences.

“As a generation, we’ve wiped out lokum consumption,” he says. “No one buys lokum. They only eat it at bayram (religious holidays) in their family’s homes.” In contrast, Marsel Turkish delights has taken lokum to a more contemporary audience. In addition to the webstore, their fares can be found around Istanbul in third wave coffee shops like Kronotrop, menswear boutiques like Bey and esteemed restaurants like Pandeli.

A big draw for many younger consumers is Marsel’s approach to ingredients. Marsel Turkish delights are all-natural, gluten-free and only sweetened with unrefined sugars. “The main reason I use apple sugar is that it’s unrefined. Since it’s from fruit, it’s only fructose. It takes longer to metabolize,” says Selim. “I wanted to use less [sugar], in terms of taste perception.” Traditional lokum can be cloyingly sweet and dusted with powdered sugar, but Marsel opts to use different ingredients to coat his lokum, including spices and dehydrated fruits.

“When you play with tradition, it’s a double edge sword,” Selim says.  “We respect the tradition, but this is our take.”

For an exclusive flavor developed for Pandeli – a legendary Istanbul restaurant located on the second floor of the Spice Bazaar – Selim opted to dust the lokum in dried powdered apple. “I thought: ‘Let’s create a flavor that gets its inspiration from the Spice Bazaar,’” he says. “Clove, cinnamon and walnuts paired with dried apple powder around the lokum. It’s on the more traditional side. I think it plays well with the traditional setting of the restaurant.” The exclusive flavor is wrapped in a special package inspired by the restaurant’s iconic turquoise tiles.

Selim has also collaborated with specialty coffee roaster Kronotrop to make a coffee-infused Lokum, and is now developing a rakı-inspired flavor for Karaköy Lokantası. “In Turkish cuisine, food is a celebration. It’s a social event. It’s not something individualistic. It’s celebrated with rituals, good conversations, and company,” he says. “How does this ritual play into people’s consumption? It’s something they savor and enjoy when they slow down a bit.”

Although traditionalists might question whether 200 years of  Lokum tradition needed updating, for Selim, his lokum is an expression of his own identity.

“We are a product of this world: a synthesis of the different cultures of the east,” he says.

“It’s coming from me. Coming from who I am. This was the only logical angle I could find.”

The post Marsel Delights appeared first on Culinary Backstreets.

America loves to co-opt a revolution and sell it back to people like they’re doing us a favor, which is I guess why we’re now seeing “Juneteenth” branded party napkins on shelves with cutesy sayings like “It’s the freedom for me.” Really, y’all? What in the name of Kwanzaa is this?

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Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” straight white men freak out, like, I said then, “vampires being fed a garlic tart.” Since I play video games, I wrote the piece using them as a metaphor. And thus “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” was born and posted.

And blew up: First here on Whatever, where it became the most-visited single post in the history of the site (more than 1.2 million visits to date), and then when it was posted on video gaming site Kotaku, where I suspect it was visited a multiple number of times more than it was visited here, because Kotaku has more visitors generally, and because the piece was heavily promoted and linked there. 

The piece received both praise and condemnation, in what felt like almost equal amounts (it wasn’t; it’s just the complainers were very loud, as they often are). To this day the piece is still referred and linked to, taught in schools and universities, and “living on the lowest difficulty setting” is used as a shorthand for the straight white male experience, including by people who don’t know where the phrase had come from.

(I will note here, as I often do when discussing this piece, that my own use of the metaphor was an expansion on a similar metaphor that writer Luke McKinney used in a piece on Cracked.com, when he noted that “straight male” was the lowest difficulty setting in sexuality. Always credit sources and inspirations, folks!)

In the ten years since I’ve written the piece, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, the response to it, and whether the metaphor still applies. And so for this anniversary, here are some further thoughts on the matter.

1. First off: Was the piece successful? In retrospect, I think it largely was. One measure of its success, as noted above, is its persistence; it’s still read and talked about and taught and used. Anecdotally, I have hundreds of emails from people who used it to explain privilege to others and/or had it used to explain privilege to them, and who say that it did what it was meant to do: Get through the already-erected defenses against the word “privilege” and convey the concept in an interesting and novel manner. So: Hooray for that. It is always good to be useful.

2. That said, Upton Sinclair once wrote that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In almost exactly the same manner, it is difficult to get a straight white man to acknowledge his privileges when his self-image depends on him not doing so. Which is to say there is a very large number of straight white men who absolutely do not wish to acknowledge just how thoroughly and deeply their privileges are systemically embedded into day-to-day life. A fair number of this sort of dude read the piece (or more perhaps more accurately, read the headline, since a lot of their specific complaints about the piece were in fact addressed in the piece itself) and refused to entertain the notion there might be something to it. Which is their privilege (heh), but doesn’t make them right.

But, I mean, as a straight white dude, I totally get it! I also work hard and make an effort to get by, and in my life not all the breaks have gone my way. I too have suffered disappointment and failure and exclusion and difficulty. In the context of a life where people who are not straight white men are perhaps not in your day-to-day world view, except as abstractions mediated by television or radio or web sites, one’s own struggles loom large. It’s harder to conceive of, or sympathize with, the idea that one’s own struggles and disappointments are resting atop of a pile of systemic privilege — not in the least because that implicitly seems to suggest that if you can still have troubles even with those many systemic advantages, you might be bad at this game called life.

But here’s the thing about that. One, just because you can’t or won’t see the systemic advantages you have, it doesn’t mean you don’t still have them, relative to others. Two, it’s a reflection of how immensely fucked up the system is that even with all those systemic advantages, lots of straight white men feel like they’re just treading water. Yes! It’s not just you! This game of life is difficult! Like Elden Ring with a laggy wireless mouse and a five-year-old graphics card! And yet, you are indeed still playing life on the lowest difficulty setting! 

Maybe rather than refusing to accept that other people are playing on higher difficulty settings, one should ask who the hell decided to make the game so difficult for everyone right out of the box (hint: they’re largely in the same demographic as straight white men), and how that might be changed. But of course it’s simply just easy to deny that anyone else might have a more challenging life experience than you have, systemically speaking. 

3. Speaking of “easy,” one of the problems that the piece had is that when I wrote the phrase “lowest difficulty,” lots of people translated that to “easy.” The two concepts are not the same, and the difference between the two is real and significant. Which is, mind you, why I used the phrase “lowest difficulty” and not “easy.” But if you intentionally or unintentionally equate the two, then clearly there’s an issue to be had with the piece. I do suspect a number of dudes intentionally equated the two, even when it was made clear (by me, and others) they were not the same. I can’t do much for those dudes, then or now.

4. When I wrote the piece, some folks chimed in to say that other factors deserved to be part of a “lowest difficulty setting,” with “wealth” being primary among them. At the time I said I didn’t think wealth should have been; it’s a stat in my formulation — hugely influential, but not an inherent feature of identity like being white, or straight, or male. This got a lot of pushback, in no small part because (and relating to point two above) I think a lot of straight white dudes believed that if wealth was in there, it would somehow swamp the privileges that being white and straight and male provide, and that would mean that everyone else’s difficulty setting was no more difficult than their own.

It’s ten years on now, and I continue to call bullshit on this. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and I’ve been in the middle, and in all of those economic states I still had and have systemic advantages that came with being white and straight and male. Yes, being wealthy does make life less difficult! But on the other hand being wealthy (and an Oscar winner) didn’t keep Forest Whitaker from being frisked in a bodega for alleged shoplifting, whereas I have never once been asked to empty my pockets at a store, even when (as a kid, and poor as hell) I was actually shoplifting. This is an anecdotal observation! Also, systemically, wealth insulates people who are not straight and white and male less than it does those who are. Which means, to me, I put it in the right place in my formulation.

5. What would I add into the inherent formulation ten years on? I would add “cis” to “straight” and “white” and “male.” One, because I understand the concept better than than I did in 2012 and how it works within the matrix of privilege, and two, in the last decade, more of the people I know and like and love have come out as being outside of standard-issue cis-ness (or were already outside of it when I met them during this period), and I’ve seen directly how the world works on and with them. 

So, yes: Were I writing that piece for the first time in 2022, I would have written “Cis Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” 

6. Ten years of time has not mitigated the observation about who is on the Lowest Difficulty Setting, especially here in the United States. Indeed, if anything, 2022 in the US has been about (mostly) straight white men nerfing the fuck out of everyone else in the land in order to maintain their own systemic advantages. Oh, you’re not white? Let’s pass laws to make sure an accurate picture of your historical treatment is punted out of schools and libraries, and the excuse we’ll give is that learning these things would be mean to white kids. You’re LGBTQ+? Let’s pass laws so that a teacher even mentioning you exist could get them fired. Trans? Let’s take away your rights for gender-affirming medical treatment. Have functional ovaries? We’re planning to let your rapist have more say in what happens to your body than you! Have a blessed day!

And of course hashtag not all straight white men, but on the other hand let’s not pretend we don’t know who is largely responsible for this bullshit. The Republican party of the United States is overwhelmingly straight, overwhelmingly white, and substantially male, and here in 2022 it is also an unabashedly white supremacist political party, an authoritarian party and a patriarchal party: mainstream GOP politicians talk openly about the unspeakably racist and anti-Semitic “Great Replacement Theory,” and about sending people who have abortions to prison, and are actively making it more difficult for minorities to vote. It’s largely assumed that once the conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court (very likely as of this writing) throws out Roe v. Wade, it’ll go after Obergefell (same-sex marriage) as soon as a challenge gets to them, and then possibly Griswold (contraception) and Loving (mixed-race marriage) after that. Because, after all, why stop at Roe when you can roll civil rights back to the 1950s at least?

What makes this especially and terribly ironic is that when game designers nerf characters, they’re usually doing it to bring balance to the game — to put all the characters on something closer to an even playing field. What’s happening here in 2022 isn’t about evening up the playing field. It’s to keep the playing field as uneven as possible, for as long as possible, for the benefit of a particular group of people who already has most of the advantages. 2022 is straight white men employing code injection to change the rules of the game, while it’s in process, to make it more difficult for everyone else. 

So yes, ten years on, the Lowest Difficulty Setting still applies. It’s as relevant as ever. And I’m sure, even now, a bunch of straight white men will still maintain it’s still not accurate. As they would have been in 2012, they’re entirely wrong about that. 

And what a privilege that is: To be completely wrong, and yet suffer no consequences for it. 

— JS

Having settled in Brussels after three decades reporting about the broader Middle East, Hugh Pope is preparing for publication “The Keys to Democracy,” a book written by his late father and classicist Maurice Pope.

In April, the postman pushed a letter through my door in Brussels, creasing it from the strong spring behind the old brass letter flap. It still didn’t spoil the clear and formal message. 

“A change of nationality has been written into the registers of the state,” the stamped and signed letter informed me. “Please make an appointment with the commune to pick up your Belgian identity card.” 

I felt a surge of relief, a sense of safe haven in my current home. And just as importantly, I felt I could now be British and European again. 

On June 24, 2016, I had woken up a citizen of the United Kingdom, entitled to live and work in Belgium and 26 other European Union countries. But when I switched on the television, BBC presenters were stumbling over the news that more than half of Britons had voted for Brexit. For years after, people in my position could never be quite sure what rights the bruising negotiations would leave us with. What would happen if we lost our jobs? 

I had arrived in Belgium just a year earlier in 2015 and had been overjoyed when my Brussels commune quickly, and automatically, gave me a five-year work and residence permit. It felt like my British identity had at last given me full membership to a real international club. 

Living and working in Turkey and several Middle Eastern countries during the three previous decades, I had struggled to win or renew my residence papers, which could sometimes be valid for as little as three months. A treasured Syrian permit took me a year to get, by which time it had nearly expired. And Britain’s imperial forays in the region meant officials’ reactions to my passport ranged from skeptical to downright hostile.  

By comparison, Belgium just wanted me to be patient. It has no U.K.-style citizenship test on medieval battle dates, prime ministers’ names or 200-year-old poems. I didn’t have to dig up a list of English relatives who had fought on Belgium’s side in European wars to boost my case. All I had to do was work for five straight years, pay my taxes, supply a birth certificate, state that I wanted citizenship and pledge to submit to the Belgian constitution, the country’s laws and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.  

I still wanted to do something to backfill a sense of belonging, though, so I started tuning into an amateur podcast called the Random History of Belgium. Host Manuel van den Eynde explained how the field of battle in many European wars turned Belgium into Europe’s crossroads, why Brussels ended up as Europe’s capital and how one third of the population of the city was born in another country, like me. 

Individualistic Belgians have been inventive, he related: think Bakelite, electric trams, speech recognition, the beauties of art nouveau, and some of the world’s most uncompromising modern buildings. He urged me on through the nearly 140 episodes with gently ironic humor, sips from a parade of powerful Belgian beers and the catchphrase: “Keep eating the waffles!” 

All this is helping me construct a new kind of plural identity. It’s quite different from being a full European just because I was British.

It had grated at me that ahead of Britain actually leaving the EU at the end of 2021, podcasts and websites began to include sophisticated ads from the British government, cleverly targeted at people like me, telling me what I had to do next. The intention behind them was good, but it felt off-key. Hundreds of thousands of U.K. citizens living in Europe hadn’t been offered a say in the — as it seemed to us — deeply flawed referendum that had cost us so much. So why the sudden concern? We knew, in fact, that we were on our own. 

Real decisions have real consequences. The brand value of being British has tanked, and high-flying British friends in Brussels report that headhunters no longer call. The public lies and insults of the Brexit campaign broke the magic spell of association with what had been seen as an example of stylish cool, democratic depth and prestigious world power. The shame of salary-drawing British members of the European Parliament standing with their backs to their colleagues while the EU anthem played still stings.

British citizens who were working in the official European circuit at the time were damned whether they jumped ship or not. High-ranking British officials had to choose between leaving, angling for passports from other EU countries, suffering long furloughs or losing access to posts with operational meaning. Some who went back to London said they found themselves working for ideologues, strictly instructing them to act nasty when negotiating future relationships with their former EU colleagues and friends — the Europeans began responding in kind. “My counterparts tell me that I can travel to Brussels if I like, but that they won’t be able to see me,” one British official lamented. 

In 2021, at a reception run with the engaging professionalism of U.K. diplomats in a colonnaded room of the British ambassador’s residence in Brussels, the British almost outnumbered the guests, even as the pandemic kept numbers down. U.K. representatives have little realistic chance of influencing much European policy anymore. And in the world of Europe-based policy organizations, London offices have thinned out and visits to Britain have shrunk in frequency and importance.  

Many little things have changed too. I’ve stopped ordering anything from U.K. online shops. Posting or receiving anything to the U.K. that remotely resembles a package now faces an automatic €23 charge — and that’s before the cost of postage or new customs levies. And even before the pandemic hit Brussels-London traffic on the Eurostar, boarding had started to involve passport and luggage checks worthy of an airport compared to the no-hassle, direct access to platforms for trains bound for France, Germany or the Netherlands.  

The web of connections will only continue to turn threadbare. U.K. students can no longer join Erasmus exchanges with European universities; U.K. job seekers usually can’t get entry-level jobs, and the new barriers will make them even less competitive. 

English does remain an official EU language — with Ireland and Malta as members — and it’s still the most prominent medium of communication in the EU bubble. Generations of Europeans grew up under American dominance, and French or German are not natural second languages for the Eastern European countries that joined the bloc two decades ago. But French is making a comeback, and German-born officials are feeling a wind in their sails. “Our reaction to the Ukraine war made us realize how everything feels different. We now feel really empowered as Europeans,” a German Eurocrat told me. 

“It’s not just the policy change in Berlin,” he added. “It’s the absence of the U.K., which used to trip us up every time we wanted to do something together.”

Old-school British policy supposedly feels safer when Europeans are divided. And NATO membership or not, all the signs point to the fact that the U.K.’s lack of EU membership undermines its leverage, whether London wants to sow division or build unity.

But be that as it may, the part of Brexit I never understood is the idea of “just wanting to get Britain out of Europe.” To me, that sounds like asking water not to feel wet.

Louisiana has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country: It ranks 47th out of the 48 states assessed, according to state officials. But U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, one of two white male Republican senators representing the state, says that’s only because Louisiana’s statistics include Black women.

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