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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

Given the “old world” nature of it, I have to think that it’s one of those things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern sweets, so you can’t really get a good perspective on it. Like if you had watched a movie like Guardians of the Galaxy before ever seeing Star Wars, you’d wonder what the big deal was about Star Wars.

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In the same token there are a lot of modern sweets that I find to be overly sweet. For example a lot of the Starbucks sweet coffee drinks are so sweet that they make me gag.

I find most modern sweet things to be disgustingly sweet, but Turkish Delight is one of the few sweets that I really like because it's not overwhelmingly sweet.

Starbucks coffee drinks are to me what I’d imagine it would be like to gargle a sheet cake. Not just sweet, but cloying, and very fatty.

Frequently they'll take something that I like and add a couple of pumps of vanilla to it, then discontinue the original recipe.

There was a cold brew with sweet cream that they had last year which was a really good cold drink that wasn't overly sweet. So this year they replace it with a cold brew with vanilla sweet cream and now it has two pumps of vanilla syrup in it in addition to the sweetness of the sweet cream. So now it's disgustingly sweet and tastes cloyingly of vanilla.

I pretty much only get lattes and drip coffee there now.

You can just ask them not to put in the vanilla; starbucks is impressively malleable, and removing a syrup is likely barely on their complexity meter, given the hyper-specific orders I’ve seen people give

You can basically give them the recipe for anything you want and they will make it for you. You don’t have to order only what’s listed on the menu.

> "one of those things that was really amazing at the time, but just can’t compare to modern sweets"

Taste is subjective/cultural. I visited Istanbul early this year and brought back home (to São Paulo, Brazil) some boxes of Turkish Delight, several flavors, and they run out really fast with family and friends. Everyone loved it.

Personally I'm not a fan of modern overly sweet treats.

I think also people severely underestimate how bland and repetitive the average person's diet used to be at the turn of the century, before food engineering and junk food. Meat and sweets were a luxury in a lot of places. Haute cuisine was reserved for the richest.

I read somewhere (can't recall where) that the fact that it's not that good was exactly why CS Lewis chose it. Even in his time it was considered "meh."

The notion being that people need little motivation to sell out.

The book was also set during the Second World War where sugar was rationed in England. I'm sure any sweets would have been highly prized by children.

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