Salon snack treat (the musical teatime)
Madeleines with Beurre Noisette
Street foodEvocation🍯facile30 min (+ 1 h resting)
Small shell-shaped cakes with a well-golden bump, flavored with beurre noisette and lemon. The treat you dip in tea at teatime.
Why this dish? The Parisian musical salons and tea parties — where Les Six gathered in the afternoon around a piano — called for these little bites. The madeleine, made a literary symbol of memory by Proust, embodies the cultured Paris in which Germaine moved.
At the hour when we left the piano for tea, one needed something to nibble with fingertips, and nothing beats a still-warm madeleine. The secret is the butter you brown until hazelnut, and the batter you let rest in the cool: it is this rest that gives it its lovely bump. Dip it in tea, close your eyes, and a whole afternoon of music comes back. We never ate just one.
Ingredients
- •Eggs — a few (structure)
- •Powdered sugar — equal parts (sweetness)
- •Flour — equal parts (body)
- •Butter — generously (moistness and beurre noisette)
- •Lemon zest — 1 (flavor)
How it was made : Madeleines, popularized in Commercy in the 18th century, were a common teatime snack at the turn of the 20th century, also sold by pastry chefs and at markets. Chilling the batter, the key to the famous bump, was part of the domestic know-how.
Sources : Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 1913 (cultural reference) · Prosper Montagné, Larousse gastronomique, 1938