Sahlab (Warm Milk Pudding Drink)

Sahlab is warm thickened milk, scented and topped with cinnamon, nuts and coconut. It is drunk across Egypt, the Levant and Turkey in winter, in much the same way hot chocolate is drunk elsewhere. Its name comes from an ingredient this recipe does not contain, and that needs saying plainly. True sahlab is thickened with salep, flour ground from the dried tubers of wild orchids, which gives a distinctive stretchy, slightly chewy texture that nothing else reproduces. Harvesting it requires digging up wild orchids, and the pressure on those populations has been severe enough that Turkey now bans the export of salep outright. Cornflour, which this recipe uses, is the standard modern substitute, and it is what almost all commercial and home versions now use. That makes this a good drink under a name that historically meant something else, which is worth knowing rather than papering over. The one instruction that matters is not to leave the pan. Milk thickened with cornflour catches on the base very readily and scorched milk taints the whole batch. The source repeats a claim that the Romans used orchid drinks as an aphrodisiac. That is recorded as folklore rather than fact.