You are exhausted today. You just returned from Washington DC where you ran with 7,000 people in the “people’s marathon.” You also applied for a Fulbright, which cost you three heavy weeks of little sleep and too much takeout. Today you have little desire to: drink, eat, move, think. Since it is your day off, you’ll enjoy a hot shower, bathrobe, and a stack of Tennessee Williams movies. Then you think about cooking, which you’ve missed, and you think about cake.
You harbor no desire to slave over a hot oven for hours, painfully glazing icing over three layers (chocolate, vanilla, chocolate), chilled to room temperature in order to keep from collapsing. You want little cakes, treats small enough to pile on a plate, and made to eat with your fingers.
So first thing, before shower and robe and return to bed, jump to the Bowery Kitchen Supply Store and pick up one of these:
While looking at madeline aspic moulds, you will remember the mention of these cakes in The Remembrance of Things Past, the first volume of Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust. Remembering this will impress you as you stand there, contemplating the long entangled history of food and literature. Perhaps you will one day write a Swann’s Way, a meditation on time and the foods that trigger memory and nostalgia.
When you return home with your mould, you sit in your reading chair and flip through Swann’s Way, in search of this passage:
“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…”
Reading this will cause you to wonder about the history (not just literary) of these cakes. Like all other attempts to unravel the curiosities of French cuisine, you will turn to your greatest weapon, the Larouse Gastronomique.
MADELEINE The origin of this ‘seashell cake so strictly pleated outside and so sensual inside’ (Marcel Proust) is the subjet of much discussion. It has been attributed to Avice, chef to Talleyrand, the French statesman, who had the idea of baking a pound-cake mixture in aspic moulds.
(100 g butter, juice from .5 lemon, pinch of salt, 125 g caster sugar, 3 eggs plus 1 egg yolk, 125 g self-rising flour)
Other authorities, however, believe that the recipe is much older and originiated in the French town of Commercy, which was then a duchy under the rule of Stanislaw Leszczynski. It is said that during a visit to the castle in 1755 the duke was very taken with a cake made by a peasant girl named Madeleine. This started the fashion for ‘madeleines’ (as they were named by the duke), which were then launced in Versailles by his daghter Marie, who was married to Louis XV.
(150 g butter, 200 g caster sugar, 6 eggs, 200 g plain flour, 1 tsp baking powder, 1 tbsp orange-flower water)
The attribution of the cake to Madeleine Paumier, cordon-bleu cook to a rich burgher of Commercy, seems doubtful.
You improve the Commercy recipe by adapting it three ways. First, mix beurre noisette (brown butter) with regular butter, which produces a nuttier flavor. Second, substitute 1/4 of the all-purpose flour for almond flour which you can make from scratch in your food processor. Finally, rather than use six whole eggs, use four eggs and two egg yolks.
And so,
1. Melt 1 tablespoon butter and pour onto madeleine molds, stick in the freezer.
2. Mix 1 cup all-purpose flour with 3/4 cups almond flour and 1 teaspoon baking powder. Set aside.
3.. Melt 1/3 cup butter until it is brown and flowers a nutty aroma.
4. Mix with 2/3 cup of butter that you have creamed with a wooden spoon.
5. Add 1 cup of caster (superfine) sugar and mix well.
6. Add four whole eggs and two egg yolks, one at a time.
7. Sift flour mixture into butter mixture.
8. Finally, stir in 1 tablespoon orange-flower water.
9. Pour into madeleine mould (which you have dusted with flour) and bake at 425ºF for about 10 minutes. Turn the madeleines onto a wire rack to cool. Best eaten fresh.
