TG Gourmet

Turkish delight (lokum) is a dense, chewy gel made by slowly cooking sugar and starch — no gelatin in the traditional recipe. A marshmallow is sugar foam: syrup whipped with gelatin until it traps air. One is firm and perfumed with rose or citrus; the other is soft, springy, and built for toasting.

People mix these two up constantly, and it's a fair mistake. Both are soft, both come dusted in powdered sugar, and both show up in gift boxes around the holidays. But squeeze one of each and the difference announces itself. Lokum resists like a firm jelly. A marshmallow springs back like a pillow.

This comparison is part of our Turkish desserts guide — lokum is the sweet most Americans have heard of but never actually tasted, so it's worth pinning down exactly what it is and what it isn't.

Key Takeaways

• Turkish delight is a starch-and-sugar gel; a marshmallow is a gelatin-and-sugar foam whipped full of air.
• Traditional lokum contains no gelatin, so it's typically vegetarian. Most American marshmallows are not.
• Lokum in its modern form comes from Ottoman Istanbul — Hacı Bekir opened his confectionery shop there in 1777, and the family business still sells it today.
• The marshmallow's ancestor is a mallow-root remedy from ancient Egypt; the fluffy modern version came out of 19th-century France and dropped the plant entirely.
• Lokum is served in small cubes beside Turkish coffee. Marshmallows get toasted, melted, and stacked into s'mores. Neither can do the other's job.

What Is Turkish Delight, Exactly?

Turkish delight — lokum in Turkish — is a confection of sugar and starch cooked slowly into a dense, fragrant gel, then cut into cubes and dusted with powdered sugar or shredded coconut. The English name came later. Ottoman confectioners called it rahat-ul hulkum, from the Arabic for "comfort of the throat," and everyday Turkish wore that down to lokum.

The flavor range runs far past the pink rose cubes most Americans have met. Rose and lemon are the classics. Walk into a good Istanbul confectioner, though, and you'll find pomegranate lokum rolled around whole pistachios, mastic lokum with its faint pine note, and double-roasted (duble) varieties that are more nut than candy.

Texture is the tell. Lokum is firm and yields slowly when you bite through it. There is no bounce, because there is no foam. We cover the full story — varieties, history, how to judge quality — in our lokum guide, and you can see the real thing in our Turkish delight collection.

What Is a Marshmallow?

A marshmallow is sugar foam. Sugar, corn syrup, and gelatin get whipped until the mixture traps a cloud of tiny air bubbles, then it sets into that familiar springy cylinder. Most of a marshmallow's volume is air, which is why a full bag weighs almost nothing.

The name is botanical. Marsh mallow is a real plant — Althaea officinalis — that grows in damp, salty ground, and its root gives off a sticky sap that people have used to soothe sore throats for thousands of years. By most food-history accounts, Egyptians were mixing mallow sap with honey and nuts some 4,000 years ago — a treat said to be reserved for gods and royalty.

Here's the twist: the marshmallow in your pantry contains zero marsh mallow. Gelatin took over the plant's job more than a century ago. The name outlived the ingredient.

How Is Each One Made?

Lokum is a patience recipe. Sugar syrup, water, a starch slurry, and a squeeze of lemon or a pinch of cream of tartar go into the pot together, then get cooked low and stirred — traditionally for an hour or more — until the mixture turns glossy and elastic. It rests about a day in starch-dusted trays before anyone cuts it. Rush any step and you get gummy sugar paste instead of that smooth, dense chew.

A marshmallow is the opposite: speed and air. Bloom the gelatin, boil the syrup, then whip the two together for ten minutes or so until the mass triples in volume. Factories took it further — in 1948, American candy maker Alex Doumak developed the extrusion method, squeezing marshmallow through tubes as one endless soft rope that gets chopped into pieces and tumbled in starch.

Note the one trick they share: both wear a coat of starch and powdered sugar so the pieces don't weld themselves together in the box.

Turkish Delight vs. Marshmallow: Side-by-Side Comparison

Which One Is Older?

Trick question — there are two honest answers.

The marshmallow's ancestor wins on raw age. Egyptians were working with mallow sap some 4,000 years ago, though what they made was closer to a soothing lozenge than a campfire candy. For most of its history, marshmallow was medicine.

The modern versions flip the order. Lokum as we know it took shape in Ottoman Istanbul in the late 1700s: Bekir Efendi, later known as Hacı Bekir after his pilgrimage to Mecca, opened a confectionery shop in the city's Bahçekapı district in 1777, and the shop's starch-set lokum became the standard the rest of the world copied. The same family firm, Ali Muhiddin Hacı Bekir, is still selling lokum in Istanbul today. When the sweet reached Britain in the 19th century, merchants sold it under a catchier name: Turkish delight.

The fluffy marshmallow is younger. French confectioners in the 1800s whipped mallow sap with sugar and egg whites into pâte de guimauve, then swapped the slow-to-harvest root for gelatin before the century was out. So the modern lokum recipe predates the modern marshmallow by several decades.

Is Turkish Delight Vegetarian? What About Marshmallows?

Traditional lokum is set with starch, which makes plain rose, lemon, and nut varieties vegetarian — and usually vegan. That's not marketing; it's just how the Ottoman recipe works.

One honest caveat. Some budget "delight" brands produced outside Turkey cut corners and set their cubes with gelatin. The label settles it in five seconds: if starch (often listed as corn starch) is the setting agent, you're holding the traditional recipe.

Marshmallows are the opposite case. Standard American brands rely on pork- or beef-derived gelatin, which rules them out for vegetarians and for anyone keeping halal or kosher, unless the bag is specifically labeled otherwise. Vegan versions built on carrageenan or soy protein exist, but they're the exception on the shelf. For a lot of Muslim, Jewish, and vegetarian households, lokum is simply the easier sweet to say yes to.

How Do You Eat Turkish Delight vs. Marshmallow?

Lokum is served, not cooked. The custom in Turkey is a single cube on the saucer beside a cup of Turkish coffee — the slow-dissolving sweetness plays against the coffee's bitterness, and neither one shouts over the other. Boxes of lokum also do heavy duty as gifts: bayram visits, hostess gifts, thank-yous. The box is part of the gesture.

If you're building a coffee-and-lokum tray at home, start with our Turkish delight collection and browse the wider desserts and sweets shelf for what goes beside it.

Marshmallows are an ingredient as much as a candy. They melt into hot chocolate, bind cereal treats, and — the main event — toast over open fire, where those trapped air bubbles let the surface caramelize while the center goes molten. The first published s'mores recipe appeared in a Girl Scout handbook in 1927, and the formula hasn't needed an update since.

Don't try to swap them. Toast lokum over a fire and it slumps into hot syrup — no air inside, nothing to puff.

Why Did the White Witch Tempt Edmund with Turkish Delight?

Blame C.S. Lewis for a century of American curiosity. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the White Witch conjures a box of enchanted Turkish delight, and Edmund betrays his own siblings for another taste.

The detail lands differently once you know the context. Sweets were still rationed in Britain when the book came out — sugar rationing didn't fully end there until 1953 — so an entire box of anything that sweet was its own kind of fantasy for Lewis's first readers. Turkish delight wasn't a random pick; it was the most luxurious sweet a British child of that era could imagine.

For plenty of Americans, Narnia is still the only place they've encountered lokum. The real thing asks for no betrayal.

Where to Buy Real Turkish Delight in the US

You don't need a flight to Istanbul. You need a label that lists starch, not gelatin, and a brand that actually makes lokum the slow way — we compared the major names, Hacı Bekir included, in our guide to the best lokum brands.

We've been sourcing Turkish sweets for American kitchens since 2003, and lokum is one of the easiest Turkish foods to give as a gift — no cooking required, and the box does half the talking. Browse the Turkish delight and confectionery collection for gift-ready boxes, check the rest of the candy shelf, or start from the full Turkish grocery store and build a whole care package around it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Turkish delight the same as a marshmallow?

No. Turkish delight is a dense gel set with starch; a marshmallow is a light foam set with gelatin and whipped air. They share a sugar dusting and nothing else — texture, ingredients, and history are all different.

Does Turkish delight contain gelatin?

Traditional lokum does not — it's set with starch, which is why it's usually vegetarian. Some cheaper brands made outside Turkey do use gelatin, so check the ingredient list if that matters to you.

What does Turkish delight taste like?

A dense, slow chew with a clean sweetness and whatever aromatic defines the batch: rose water in the classic pink cubes, sharp citrus in lemon, pine-like resin in mastic, and toasted pistachio in the nut-filled rolls.

Are marshmallows vegetarian?

Usually not. Standard marshmallows are set with gelatin derived from pork or beef, which also rules them out for halal and kosher diets. Vegan marshmallows made with carrageenan or soy protein exist but are less common.

Can you toast Turkish delight like a marshmallow?

No. A marshmallow toasts because its air-filled foam lets the surface caramelize while the inside melts. Lokum has no air structure, so heat just melts it into syrup. Serve it as-is, with coffee.

Why is it called Turkish delight?

The Turkish name is lokum, from an Arabic phrase meaning "comfort of the throat." When the candy reached Britain in the 19th century, sellers marketed it as "Turkish delight," and the English-speaking world kept the nickname.