Mmm.. tastes like cheap perfume.

As Josh noted today, last night we went to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I really think there should be an Oxford comma in there, but I suppose C.S. Lewis is allowed to make his own decisions). It was fantastic. Disney-fied (in that Aslan is stabbed to death but does not bleed... at all), and I disagreed with some of the costume design (the fabulous and terrifying Tilda Swinton was clothed in a very architectural combination of what looked like cardboard and felt), but overall it was true to the story, Lewis's prose (as I remember it), and the mishmash of imagery and allusion therein. Aslan was perfect. The Witch was terrifying. Everything I felt when the book was first read to me came crashing back.

Then, there was the disappointment in Turkish Delight. Don't get me wrong, it was real Turkish Delight in the movie, but it forced me to remember how very vile the stuff is. When I first heard the story, I imagined Turkish Delight to be like good truffles. A little bit soft, a little bit gooey, super-sweet and dusted with cocoa. I wanted it desperately, for it was the candy of a magic place called Narnia. Of course, as an American kid, I didn't know it could really found in a less-magical place called England.

An article in Slate describes one person's similar disappointment in discovering that this near-mythical candy (at least to American kids who read C.S. Lewis) is gross. Gross, gross, gross:

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Edmund Pevensie gobbled up several pounds of this treat in one sitting and clamored for more. The evil White Witch, Jadis, had magicked it up to win his fealty. As a child in Indiana, I hadn't realized that the confection actually existed. (Nor did I think that "wardrobes" existed anymore—surely, I reasoned, British people had closets by now.) I thought C.S. Lewis had invented it, knowing how much more vivid an imagined pleasure can be than a real one. But I loved to think about what it must taste like. I thought it would be crumbly and buttery and warm, like shortbread with walnuts, just out of the oven, with a rich, molten filling inside. "Each piece was sweet and light to the very center and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious," Lewis wrote.

And so, with anticipation, I took a bite of the Turkish Delight. And a second later, spat it into my hand. It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust, or like a lump of Renuzit air freshener: The texture was both waxy and filling-looseningly chewy. This … this? ... was the sweetmeat that led Edmund to betray his siblings and doomed Aslan to death on a stone slab? Watching the movie last week, I cringed watching Edmund push piece after squidgy red piece into his drooling mouth, shuddering to think that children in theaters everywhere were bound to start yammering for the candy and that on Christmas morning or Hanukkah nights, their faces would crumple with disappointment as their teeth sank into the vile jelly they had thought they wanted.

My disappointment came one chilly night in Dublin. Claire and our friend Katy were visiting me there and Katy was staying in U2's Clarence Hotel for one night. It was cold and wet and the pubs close early, so we went out to buy some chocolate and retreat to the room to watch HBO and lounge on Egyptian-cotton sheets. At the newsagent's, we got a couple of Cadbury bars, one of which was Turkish Delight. We were very excited to finally try that sweet that heretofore had only existed in Narnia.

Blech. Onomatopoeia is really all I have for the taste. The rose flavor is the most common, it seems, and it's nasty. That night in Dublin, we peeled back the top layer of Cadbury's chocolate to peer at the mysterious pink goo. We sniffed it. Then we scraped it off and ate the unmolested chocolate before foregoing the whole enterprise and chucking the bar itself.

Flowers have their place in cooking. Orangeflower water gives Madeleines their delicate fragrance and a few drops of rosewater can give character and body to truffles. But straight-up rosewater does not a pleasant candy make. Crazy Turks.

Check out the article (it's short, I promise). The writer suggests that wartime depravation of sweets colored that generation's affection for it.