{"id":953,"date":"2019-12-05T11:07:01","date_gmt":"2019-12-05T11:07:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/herbarium\/?p=953"},"modified":"2019-12-09T22:23:13","modified_gmt":"2019-12-09T22:23:13","slug":"adventbotany-2019-day-5-lumps-of-delight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/herbarium\/2019\/12\/05\/adventbotany-2019-day-5-lumps-of-delight\/","title":{"rendered":"#AdventBotany 2019 Day 5: Lumps of Delight"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Alastair Culham<\/a><\/h1>\n

\"\"Where would Chistmas be without those dusty cubes of jelly-like substance covered in choking sugar dust?<\/p>\n

Dickens features ‘Lumps of delight’ in chapter 3 of The Mystery of Edwin Drood<\/p>\n

\u2018Which way shall we take, Rosa?\u2019<\/em>
\nRosa replies: \u2018I want to go to the Lumps\u2013of\u2013Delight shop.\u2019<\/em>
\n\u2018To the \u2013 ?\u2019<\/em>
\n\u2018A Turkish sweetmeat, sir. My gracious me, don\u2019t you understand\u00a0 anything? Call yourself an Engineer, and not know that?\u2019<\/em>
\n\u2018Why, how should I know it, Rosa?\u2019<\/em>
\n\u2018Because I am very fond of them. But O! I forgot what we are to pretend. No, you needn\u2019t know anything about them; never mind.\u2019<\/em>
\nSo he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps\u2013of\u2013Delight shop, where Rosa makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which he rather indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great zest: previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like rose\u2013leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
The Mystery of Edwin Drood<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As with Edwin Drood, our family do not all love Turkish Delight but it does get eaten at Christmas by those whe do not prefer chocolate.\u00a0 So what is the botanical link here?<\/p>\n

The key interest here is the use of refined starch in the production of modern Turkish delight. Starch is a primary storage byproduct of photosynthesis.\u00a0 It is a polymer of glucose units linked by glycosidic bonds.\u00a0Starch grains have been found in human inhabited areas dating back as much as 105000bp (Mercarder, 2009) and the isolation of starch is described in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History<\/em> around AD79 (Bostock & Riley, 1855).\u00a0 The use of starch to to thicken sweet and sticky throat medicines in Persia seems to date back to the 9th century AD. The point at which this evolved into the sweets known as lokum (known in English as Turkish Delight) is debated (Richardson, 2002) but there is no doubt that the Haci Bekir Company<\/a> in Turkey, founded in 1777, lay claim to being the oldest confectioner of Turkish Delight in the world.\u00a0 Curiously they state “After the discovery of starch by German scientist Constantin Kirchhoff in 1811, Hac\u0131 Bekir began to use this instead of flour” but Kirchoff actually worked on the chemical conversion of starch (which had been known for many centuries) into syrup (Prabook<\/a>) so this story may owe more to marketing than history.\u00a0 Whatever is the reality about the development of Turkish Delight, it remains a very popular Christmas sweet.\u00a0 It is flavoured by a range of other plant products including rose water, lemon, pistachio and mastic.<\/p>\n