For a century now, French novelist Marcel Proust has cornered the market in madeleine-related musings.
In his masterpiece A la recherche du temps perdu, there is a scene in which the taste of the buttery, shell-shaped cakes with their signature ‘bump’ transports the writer back to his childhood in one bite.
Although early drafts of the seven-tome opus show that he originally wrote ‘stale bread’ instead, ‘Proust’s Madeleine’ has become shorthand for the magical power of everyday events to stir up deeply held memories – and a cheat’s way of sounding terribly well read.
While the Normandy coastal town of Cabourg embraces its role as the location for Proust’s story (he wrote it in the Grand Hotel de Cabourg, which sports Proust exhibits throughout), the Madeleine’s origins lie some 300 miles away in the town of Commercy (Meuse), which has a much bigger claim to the cake’s story.
Commercy’s legend tells how they were invented by a quick-thinking kitchen maid who was working in the palace of Polish King Stanislas while he was exiled in Lorraine in the mid-18th Century. When the baker fell ill during a ball, she is said to have whipped up her grandma’s recipe and served them as dessert.
When the King asked what they were called and she had no name for them, he gratefully bestowed her own moniker – Madeleine – on the delicious confection.
Middle Age creation
Other stories date from even earlier, with rumours of it being created in the Middle Ages for pilgrims on the route to Santiago de Compostela, using scallop shells as moulds; or in the 17th Century when the Cardinal of Retz, the profligate rogue, had his cook Madeleine Simonin whip up a new kind of cake, which took her name.
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However it happened, the wider cake-loving community across France may never have discovered Madeleines without the railway.
Commercy was on the route between Paris and Strasbourg, and trains had to stop at the town’s station to refill stocks of coal and water. The platform-side cake sellers had a captive audience among the train passengers, who no doubt bought more than they needed and shared them with friends at their destination.
Today they are sold in almost every food shop, station and airport in France to sate hungry travellers, but mass-produced Madeleines sadly lack the je ne sais quoi to inspire Proustian levels of nostalgia. Visiting Commercy is well worth the detour for the real thing.
There are just two Madeleine producers left in Commercy, where once there were 15.
The first is A la Cloche Lorraine, whose Madeleines are light and slightly lemony and ideal for taking home to share (they keep for a month or two).
La boîte à
MadeleinesLa boîte à Madeleines/Facebook
The other is La Boîte à Madeleines, which is run by brothers Stéphane and Thierry Zins whose family business dates from 1951.
When I visited their operation, set in a modern building next to a McDonald’s just outside the town centre, I was in awe of their painstaking baking process – not just because they do not use any preservatives or colouring, but also for their dedication to what is essentially an incredibly repetitive task. Make the batter, fill the moulds, bake, over and over.
I stood watching the glass-fronted ovens as the famous ‘bumps’ began to rise. Their buttery Madeleines have a hint of lemon and are light and fluffy. Eating them there and then is how it should be done.
The mark of a good Madeleine is a good size ‘bump’, even if it is hard to fathom how it happens. Some say the shape of the pan makes the difference, others suggest it is all in the recipe.
Whatever the pan you buy, or the recipe you use, there is nothing like biting into a warm Madeleine, dusted with icing sugar, and tasting that buttery sponge with its delicate ridges.
Purists say you should not add anything to them, though that rule is frequently broken with all sorts of enhancements such as lemon zest, orange flower water, chocolate, and even olive oil in Provence.
I say adapt them all you like: how else will you justify owning a fluted cake pan if you stick to just one recipe?
You could even make a savoury version, such as they serve alongside classical music recitals at the chambres d’hôtes Villa du Châtelet near Compiègne.
The villa was built by composer Léo Delibes, and the star of his opera Lakmé, Marie Van Zandt, just happened to be friends with Proust’s father and inspired the character Odette in A la recherche du temps perdu.
Extracted from Amuse Bouche: How to Eat Your Way Around France by Carolyn Boyd, published by Profile, £18.99. Available from all good bookshops and online.
