Turkish delight is one of the later additions to the sugary repertoire of the region, a 19th-century innovation that is still evolving. In the pastry kitchens of Nar Gourmet, a venerable provisions shop and restaurant in Istanbul, they make extraordinary versions of the usual flavors — roasted pistachio, rose and mastic — along with special varieties like orange and tahini-grape molasses.

I sampled them all with Banu Ozden of the Turkish Cultural Foundation’s Culinary Arts Center, and learned that unlike the mass-produced Turkish delight I’d had in the States, properly made Turkish delight should never stick to the teeth. It is supposed to melt in the mouth, leaving a glorious perfume behind.

To help me take in the overwhelming entirety of Turkish sweets, Ms. Ozden broke them down into four distinct categories.

First, she said, there are sherbet sweets, which include cakes, pancakes and flaky pastries that have been soaked in sugar syrup, including baklava. In Turkey, baklava is generally made with sugar syrup, not honey, which allows the character of the nuts to reign. The pastry, called yufka and related both to phyllo and strudel dough, is also traditionally brushed with ewes’ milk butter rather than cow butter to give it a deeper, richer taste.

Then there are fruit desserts, usually containing poached or candied apricots, pears, cherries, mulberries, quince or melon. One centuries-old technique is to candy slices of pumpkin with slaked lime to preserve a crisp exterior before reaching the jellylike center. At the fashionable Mikla restaurant, the chef Mehmet Gurs serves it with Anatolian apple sorbet, crushed sesame seeds, grape molasses and a foam made from boiled soapwort root for a dessert that’s modernist in form but traditional in content.

Perhaps the largest dessert category are the helvas (sometimes spelled halvahs and related to halwa, which is Arabic for any kind of sweet or dessert). These encompass both the familiar sesame variety and an array of buttery flour and semolina confections generally made at home. Helvas are defined by their texture and sweetness: all dense and highly sugary, based on nut, seed or grain flours.