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Madeleines are traditional French pastries made with eggs, butter, flour and sugar. They are absolutely scrumptious
with tea. Even though their history is clouded, many of the members of the Magdalene.org email list enjoy making and
eating these little cakes in honor of Mary Magdalene on her feast day, July 22.
"In culinary lore, Madeleines are always associated with Marcel Proust, whose autobiographical novel, Remembrance of
Things Past, begins as his mother serves him tea and "those short, plump little cakes called petits Madeleines, which
look as though they had been molded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell." The narrator dips a corner of a
little cake into the tea and then is overwhelmed by memories; he realizes that the Madeleines bore "in the tiny and
almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast tructure of recollection." ...But Madeleines had existed long before
Proust's boyhood. Numerous stories, none very convincing, attribute their invention to a host of different pastry
cooks, each of whom supposedly named them for some particular young woman. Only three things are known for sure. One
is that Madeleine is a French form of Magdalen (Mary Magdalen, a disciple of Jesus, is mentioned in all four gospels).
Another is that Madeleines are always associated with the little French town of Commercy, whose bakers were said to have
once, long ago, paid a "very large sum" for the recipe and sold the little cakes packed in oval boxes as a specialty in
the area. Finally, it is alow known that nuns in eighteenth-century France frequently supported themselves and their schools
by making and selling a particular sweet...Commercy once had a convent dedicated to St. Mary Magdelen, and the nuns,
probably when all the convents and monastaries of France were abolished during the French Revolution, sold their recipe
to the bakers for an amount that grew larger with each telling." -- Rare Bits: Unusual Origins of Popular Recipes,
Patricia Bunning Stevens [Ohio University Press:Athens] 1998 (p. 178)
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Product |
Price |
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Madeleine pan |
$8.46 |
| You'll need one of these if you're going to make Madeleines...this is the least expensive one
available from Amazon.com's kitchen department. They are also available from specialty kitchen shops, but generally cost more.
This pan is *not* non-stick! You will need to grease and flour it. |
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Pure Butter
Madeleines - Plain |
$4.99 |
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| If you don't want to attempt any of the recipes, try some already-prepared Madeleines.
They are better when freshly baked, but this is a close second. |
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