What was up with C.S. Lewis loving Turkish Delight so much?

Turkish Delight is a confection of starch and sugar, coated in powdered sugar, and flavored with rosewater, lemon, Bergamot, pistachios, or any other variety of options.

And it is very, very difficult to make. Your lack of culinary skill suggests you can't pull it off, my friend.

C.S. Lewis, the author most famous for the Chronicles of Narnia series, was obsessed with Turkish Delight--to the extent he ate it habitually and often mentioned it in his books routinely. Even the character of Edmund in Narnia asks for Turkish Delight from a witch. For a relatively obscure candy (to western audiences), Lewis seemed quite smitten to it. But why?

The Daily Jstor dove into the matter and posits a theory with a systematic analysis.

Turkish Delight was created in the 1700s, and popularized in the 1800s. English tourists to Turkey came across it and fell in love. The problem is that the candy was--and is--very difficult to make and has never been successfully recreated en masse in Europe, even now in our modern age. It involves painstaking patience and an avoidance of sugar crystallization, which apparently Europeans and the western hemisphere are incapable of accomplishing to any great degree. Yet, Europeans loved the treat whenever it could be imported from Turkey.

Try as you might, you probably can't make this.

Lewis began making notes on Narnia in 1939, just as World War II caused England to start rationing food. Lewis was also enamored with the nation of Turkey. For example, the hero character of Narnia, Aslan, is named after the archaic Turkish word for lion. (Pssh. Like, who doesn't know ancient Turkish words?)

In 1942, as the war raged on, confections were added to the list of rationed food. One had to use ration coupons, along with money, and register at the shop selling candy to purchase sweets--and then wait in massively long lines, just to add insult to injury. Turkish Delight became the rarest of rarities. Indeed, it wasn't until 1953 that confections were finally removed from the ration list, eight years after World War II ended.

Even Christmas trees were rationed during the war. Considering Narnia is heavily influenced by the holiday, or lack thereof, Lewis seemed to be hinting at a desire for normalcy in a time of the chaos of war. Turkish Delight was a holiday treat at a time when war dictated there could be no normalcy and surely no treats.

Lewis possibly loved Turkish Delight not just because it was a sweet treat or an exotic snack from the edge of Asia. Lewis potentially just wanted the normalcy of life, of holidays, of England to come back from the depths of death, of hell, of war.

And he found that normalcy in a candy.