Dessert and tea-time petits-fours (dry cakes that keep and travel)
Madeleines of Memory
TravelEvocation🍯facile30 min + resting
Small, soft shell-shaped cakes with a characteristic hump, flavored with browned butter and lemon zest, golden from the oven. They are served at tea time, dipped in tea or herbal tea.
Dessert and tea-time petits-fours (dry cakes that keep and travel)
Small, soft shell-shaped cakes with a characteristic hump, flavored with browned butter and lemon zest, golden from the oven. They are served at tea time, dipped in tea or herbal tea.
You may know that Marcel, cousin of my dear Louise and witness at our wedding, made a simple madeleine the greatest of revealers: that a dipped cake can resurrect an entire swath of the past—this can hardly surprise the man who wrote about memory. The secret, I was told, lies in the butter cooked to a hazelnut hue, and in resting the batter in the cold—that is what gives the famous hump. We stored them in a tin box, and they kept for days, ready for tea. Dip one, I pray you, and observe what rises in you.
Ingredients
- •Fresh eggs — three (structure)
- •Powdered sugar — as much as flour (softness and browning)
- •Wheat flour — one measure (body)
- •Fine butter, cooked to hazelnut — a generous portion (signature flavor)
- •Lemon zest — one (freshness)
How it was made : A specialty of Commercy popularized in the 18th century, the madeleine was a universal tea-time cake at the turn of the 20th century, sold in boxes and offered as a travel gift. It was baked in scallop-shaped tin molds.
Sources : Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, 1913 · Pierre Lacam, Le Mémorial historique de la pâtisserie, 1890