Snacktion: Madeleines, Plain and Fancy

By Meredith Brody

Is there a more famous baked good than the one that inspired Marcel Proust’s seven-volume, several-thousand-paged novel, called, variously Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time?

It’s “one of those squat plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’, which look as though they had been molded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell,” a bit of which which Proust drops in an herb tisane made from linden flowers. “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 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 invaded my senses…”

Yikes! The first instance, perhaps, of the “I’ll have what he’s having” phenomenon. The tea-soaked madeleine crumb has unleashed a memory of the same treat that he tasted on Sunday mornings in his aunt Leonie’s bedroom at Combray – “and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.” And from that the many pages of A la recherché du temps perdu sprang.

A.J. Liebling famously wrote “In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.” Or, we think, succumbed to apoplexy.

Anyway, some madeleines both classic and altered found their way into the office the other day, and we’re not sure if they inspired SF Weekly staffers to any new journalistic heights, but they were light, moist, and quite a treat at 70 to 100 trans-fat-free calories each. The Donsuemor madeleines (“the one you remember,” a neat turn of phrase), come in five varieties: traditional, traditional dipped in chocolate, lemon zest, chocolate, and chocolate dipped in chocolate. We’re a traditional girl, we thought, but we really liked the round zesty lemon ones. Novel indeed.