In the Year of Fearless Baking: Episode #16: Madeleines
I’ve gone back and forth a bit about whether or not to talk about Proust in this post. It seems that every time something is written about Madeleines, he just has to make an appearance. And, I mean, of course he does.
The truth is, I loved Swann’s Way. I know that a lot of people don’t feel this way, because it’s long and outrageously descriptive, and quite unlike the writing we’ve become accustomed to in the Postmodern era. The language just kind of washes over you, and drags you willingly through the deepest parts of his mind. It’s gorgeous.
Interestingly enough, my experience in the kitchen today did bring up a lot of memories. Tracking down the special Madeleine pan I have reminded me of where I was in my life when I bought in my early twenties. I was on the verge of launching my first business, which was basically tearing the rest of my life apart, and trying to keep myself together. It was a difficult time, to say the least, and for some reason I spent about a month obsessed with making Madeleines. I experimented with changing different variables, randomly focused on finding the perfect formula. Escapist? Definitely. But I think sometimes that’s what is required to make it through bumpy moments in life.
That was all a very long time ago, and I haven’t made them since, so the process felt rather foreign and new. There was a good reason why I included them on the list after all. I used this weird Polish flour my parents gave me as an Easter present. According to my research, it is a low protein cake flour, so it seemed like the right candidate for these tiny sponge cakes. Isn’t this packaging amazing? I love her crown.
I used this recipe here, and decided to follow Joe Pastry’s lead and not chill the batter for the traditional four hours before baking. I feel like I still got enough of a ‘hump’, without them looking like ‘golf balls on the half shell’, to quote Mr. Pastry himself.
The baking Madeleines filled the house with some of the best smells that I know- brown butter, scraped vanilla bean, and lemon zest. Although I rather doubt that any of these things were a part of the original experience, for some reason the smell brought me back to an evening when I was very small. My sister and I were at the house of a favorite babysitter (I think her name was Paige?), and we were making Christmas cookies.
It was lovely, and although this little flashback did not inspire in me a desire to spend the next several years picking through the entire memory of my childhood (as the bite of Madeleine did for Proust), it did make me feel very sentimental and nostalgic. Ah, life! Beautiful, strange, and forever changing.
