So, as I’m writing out these recipes, or sorting through photos on my phone, I’m getting all these memories bubbling up, sometimes childhood ones, a little bit like Monsieur Proust. This has to be one of the best paragraphs about food I’ve ever read.
“She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded 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, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, 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 myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours ….?”
-Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way”
The madeleines triggered memories of an aunt who used to eat them, summer holidays, a childhood home.
“The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval…But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered…the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment.”
-Ibid
“The smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment.” Amazing. And how often is it childhood memories, too?
On a side note, are you also suddenly hungry for madeleines 😂
If so, here is the Madeleines recipe from Michel Roux Jr. LOVE that they’re sold as “buttery little French cakes to have with a cup of tea or coffee”.
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