People who know anything at all about Proust probably know that he was obsessed with the flavor of the small, shell-shaped tea cakes known as madeleines. The madeleine eaten late in his life, dipped in a lime blossom tisane, recalled the madeleines of his youth, a sense memory to which he attributes the triggering of Remembrance. As this petit gateau was responsible for 3500-some pages of exquisite prose, I figured it was worth investing in a madeleine pan. Obviously, these were destined to be the mainstay of refreshment at all Marcel Proust Support Group functions.
Searching among my hundreds of cookbooks, I looked first to the sumptuous Dining With Proust by Jean-Bernard Naudin, Anne Borrel, and Alain Senderens (Random House, 1992) and Shirley King's equally captivating Dining With Marcel Proust, A Practical Guide to the Cuisine of the Belle Epoque (Thomas and Hudson, London, 1979) for recipes. In the first source, the instructions called for refrigerating the batter for an hour, then bringing it back to room temperature for half an hour. As they did not mention the rationale for not simply refrigerating for half an hour, recipe #1 got disqualified. In the second, "practical" source, the recipe suggested using an electric mixer if desired; as it turned out, to suggest doing this without one was highly impractical.
The Gourmet Cookbook, Vol. I (Gourmet Books, 1972) had this recipe that began with rubbing a sugar cube on a citrus object until the cube was saturated with the oil; it went on to cook the batter in a saucepan. So far, all three recipes called for anal retentive buttering of the madeleine molds, and all the photographs were identical; that's where the similarity ended--neither proportions, ingredient lists or methods of preparation matched up.
Sighing, I reached for the skudgewomp-encrusted, coverless 1967 Joy of Cooking, which had this perfectly comprehensible recipe.
Madeleines
A moment of horror followed, as I re-read the baking instructions once again. Incredibly, Joy failed to mention buttering the pans at all, much less buttering with sheer compulsion. For years, Joy has been a veritable Bible; to catch the Rombauers in such a flagrant sin of ommission shook my faith to its very roots. I cringed in retrospect, remembering the hundreds of times I had scanned The Joy as I ran out to a catering gig, refreshing my memory on the preparation of some forgotten sauce, never once suspecting that the Rombauers could be fallible.
"And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings in Combray... my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." -Swann's Way