Les madeleines de proust

Last week I was clearly in a nostalgic mood so I made madeleines, financiers and khao suey (see photos below). The baking reminded me of when I trained for my French state cooking diploma. While training, the chef explained to us how it was so vastly different from the pastry diploma. For one, cooks are not allowed to use machines like the pastry blender and must know how to do everything with rudimentary tools and elbow oil (“huile de coude”), in other words physical strength. In the opposite pastry lab, which we could look into as we were separated by glass walls, we could observe their movements, calm, harmonious, like ballet dancers or fish swimming peacefully around in an aquarium to the smooth even rhythms of the so very helpful machines. The energy in our lab was electric and animated, rather noisy.

With pastry, there is very little room for improvisations or errors, a constant need to control and anticipate each step of assembling a pastry and its elements of which there are usually many, an obsession with hitting the right temperature. Pastry is complicated chemistry basically. But the one challenging aspect of pastry that most surprised me is the endless need to use up a constant stock of ongoing butter, cream, milk, and more importantly, either egg whites, or egg yolks forcing one into an infinite baking loop. I honestly think that’s why many pastry chefs get stuck in that career path. Which came first, the egg or the chicken? Definitely the egg, definitely the egg. So much for that origin story.  

Food history and mythology has entirely gripped my attention lately, I say mythology because when it comes to many recipes or ingredients, it is hard to come across hard historical facts, therefore their origin stories are often to be taken with a pinch of salt. No matter really because they are great stories. Let’s take the “financier” for example, a simple and tasty French cake made of almond powder, flour, egg whites, powdered sugar and beurre noisette (brown butter). One version of its origin says that, at the end of the nineteenth century, a baker called Lasnes deliberately shaped these cakes like gold bricks in the financial district of Bourse in Paris to please the traders and bankers and made them an instant hit.

One of my preferred pastries is the madeleine, an unpretentious shell shaped sponge cake that is remarkably yummy and comforting. Dipped in some hot tea and combined with a square of dark chocolate and heaven has been invited into your life for a brief instant. I would share this snack with my mother Mimlu as a child and now share this with Pablo and Nino my boys. Its origin story is rather fun. King Stanislas of Poland was exiled in the Château de Commercy in Northeastern France in the mid seventeenth century. He would throw lavish banquets and, on one such occasion, his pastry chef quarreled with the cooking staff and left in a huff and a puff with his pastries under his arm as the meal was about to start. Disaster! One of the maids, Madeleine, came up with a quick solution, baking a simple sponge cake, a recipe she had inherited from her grandmother. The guests were delighted by this delicious treat. To thank her for her great work, Stanislas named the cake after her. His daughter Marie went on to marry Louis XV, the king of France, and it is believed she brought the recipe to the royal French court where it became most popular.

There is another reason why this has become such an iconic cake for the French and that is because it famously appears in the novel In search of lost time in a passage when Marcel Proust, the author, is flooded with emotion and memories as he eats a madeleine.

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. “

This passage had such a powerful effect on French culture, that now the madeleine of Proust has become a notorious expression in the French language and psyche and waybeyond. We all have that “madeleine de proust”, that dish or ingredient, not necessarily the madeleine itself, that fills our soul with love and comfort, often attached to fond childhood memories, that we can eat when we are feeling down and feel immediately better.

When I work as a Paris food tour guide, I love to share with the groups the stories around the madeleine with them, often offering them one each as a welcome bite, sometimes with a square of chocolate. And then I love to hear about their own madeleine the proust, a delicious thanksgiving meal item like the sweet potatoes with marshmallows, or a grandma’s mouthwatering lasagna, or a parent’s scrumptious pierogi, or a spouse’s soothing dal… My personal madeleine is Khao Suey, a Burmese golden curried chicken coconut milk soup, thickened with gram (chickpea) flour served with a myriad of delightful condiments like fried dried shrimps, fried garlick, chopped eggs, coriander, chilies, green onions, rice noodles, lemon juice. A dish that combines both the egg and the chicken putting everyone on the same page😊. Many Bengali households make this dish and I have the fondest memories of sharing this meal in childhood in Kolkata with my family including my beloved uncle, aunt and cousins who we also lived with (Gautam, Gopa, Rahul and Kunal). It is a lot of work but entirely worth the trouble. So which is your very own madeleine de proust? Don’t hesitate to share them in the comments’ section below.

Madeleines

Financiers

Khao suey