60. The History of Madeleines

by Diana S. |
A tin of madeleines dusted with powdered sugar

It’s our birthday!! Today, The Land of Desire kicks off its fifth year and what better way to celebrate than with a little cake? This week, I’m focusing on the history of one of my favorite French treats: the humble, beloved madeleine! “One could almost call the madeleine France’s national cookie” wrote Patricia Wells in the New York Times back in 1983. She didn’t know about the endless macaron obsession that was still to come, but I think she has a point. This week, pull up a chair, pour a cup of tea, and definitely make sure to sign up for the newsletter (hint: I’m sharing my favorite recipe!!!) while we celebrate the life and times of the French madeleine.

Episode 60: “Madeleines”

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Madeleine miscellany:

Plate of madeleines with cup of tea
This podcast host’s own recent batch of madeleines, steaming hot out of the oven, paired with French tea, pour faire goûter.

Transcript

Bienvenue, and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host Diana, and today it’s time for a celebration – a birthday celebration, that is! The Land of Desire is officially four years old. Can you believe it? I figured we’d kick off our fifth year with a birthday party. Then I realized the party needed one crucial ingredient: cake! After all, as Julia Child once said, “a party without cake is just a meeting.” But we aren’t just going to talk about any old cake. We’re going to talk about my favorite, easy, irresistible and oh-so-French kind of cake: a perfect little seashell that sits on your saucer, begging to be dunked into tea or cafe au lait. That’s right, you guessed it – today we’re talking about the madeleine! One of the all-time classics, madeleines are nevertheless overshadowed, sometimes, by those jewel box macarons in a million colors, or the towering piles of choux pastry and chestnut cream inside a religieuse, and delicately stacked opera cakes. The charming little scalloped sponges are humble and unassuming, and that’s what makes them wonderful. These are not special occasion cakes. They’re the everyday occasion cakes, the Tuesday afternoon treat, the reminder that every day is worth a bit of celebration. Madeleines are the treat of childhood, the simple pleasure of a life well lived. While Christmas might call for a buche de noel and Epiphany demands a galette du roi, the madeleine is the star of one very beloved ritual in particular, one that most foreigners haven’t even heard of: le goûter.
 
 
If you’d like to feel your soul exit your body, ask a French woman for her favorite snack. “The French” she will hiss at you in a low tone, eyebrows lowered in disappointment, “do not snack.” Snacking? That is an American thing. It’s sloppy. It’s gauche. Snacking is for undisciplined people, grazing like cattle who wander across the field. The French would never! This solemn truth gets trotted out in every Francophile book published in England or America, next to its cousins: “French people take their time eating meals” and, of course, “French women don’t get fat.” This unholy trinity of French dining aphorisms endures decade after decade, accepted as gospel by foreigners and French people alike. But of course, like every other stereotype about the French and their eating habits, you have to kick at it a little before the truth starts to emerge.
 
Here is an accurate statement: French people do indeed eat food on a remarkably synchronized schedule. Compared to the United States, where breakfast takes place any time between 5 AM and 3 PM, sliding so carelessly into the next eating window that we call it “brunch”, French dining habits are very strict, very predictable and very, very universal. At 8 AM, breakfast – nothing fancy or too heavy, some cafe au lait with a croissant. Lunch arrives promptly at noon, like a tidal wave of hunger sweeping over the nation: Whether you’re eating a full, leisurely repas or you’re part of the younger generation scarfing down a tartine at your desk, on any given day at 12:30 PM, more than 50% of the French population is eating. And as any hapless, hungry American tourist learns on their first trip to Paris, dinner doesn’t roll around until 8 PM. 
 
France’s mealtime traditions aren’t just widespread – they’re ancient. In 1393, a useful little text named The Housekeeper of Paris instructed aspiring young housewives in the art of domestic bliss. The text was wide-ranging and eminently practical, covering topics like husbandly devotion, gardening, the hiring and firing of servants, and, of course, food. “As the scriptures say,” it reminds the reader, “to eat once a day is to live the life of an angel, to eat twice a day is to live the life of a man, but to eat three or four or more times a day is to live the life of a beast.” As always, this book seems to remind us, what separates us from the animals is our mastery of our appetites. But sometimes that is a very thin line indeed. One hundred years before The Housekeeper of Paris was written, manual laborers already enjoyed a dining schedule with at least 3 meal breaks. Despite living in a world without mechanical clocks, these workers kept to a regular schedule, based around the canonical hours of the church. Meal time changed depending on the season and the length of the days – nobody wanted to be eating lunch in the dark, after all – but the meal times were nevertheless consistent, observed by the community and sometimes even enshrined in local laws. Breakfast took place just after dawn, as the sun was rising. In the middle of the day, workers paused for lunch, the largest meal of the day, provided by their overseer. As the sun set around 5 or 6 in the evening, the workers received or went home for a light supper before passing out. By the time the ink was dry on The Housekeeper of Paris, workers embraced three square meals a day, no matter how beastly the idea might be. But what about those who weren’t so desperate for calories? What about those who lived a life of leisure, free to distinguish themselves from the animals in the field?
 
By the beginning of the 1700s, meal times had barely budged from their medieval time slots. The same routine: a light breakfast at dawn, a large, satisfying lunch at noon, and light supper at sunset. But then, suddenly, a massive force disrupted this centuries old tradition. It was the same overwhelming force that disrupted everything else in French society at the time: the massive gravitational field of the Sun King, Louis XIV.
 
If all the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players, there was no 18th century theatrical production more elaborate and sustained than the royal court of Versailles. The Sun King kept his courtiers happy with bread and circuses, distracting them from political schemes with ostentatious balls, masquerades, and of course, feasts. Every action Louis took was in service of spectacle, distraction, shock and awe. It was only a matter of time before his mealtimes followed suit.
 
Almost nothing about the Sun King was private: his courtiers watched him dress, shave, go to the bathroom, and of course, eat. The King’s lunch was traditionally hearty, but that was nothing compared to the meal to come. A light supper before bed? Not when you’re a living god. At 10 PM, the doors opened to the greatest culinary spectacle in France: Le Grand Couvert, the King’s dinner. Anyone who was anyone was there, and anyone who wanted to be someone was there, too. The king and queen sat behind an enormous table, decorated with gold, silver and crystal, while 324 different staff members prepared, plated and served a dinner for the ages. Soup, eggs, oysters, aspics, paté, meat pie – and that was just the appetizers. Chickens, steaks, game birds, venison, fish, and often one stuffed within the other, paraded out for the king’s consumption, accompanied by side dishes. Then, of course, came dessert: a fantasia of spun sugar, cream, pastry, bonbons and more. By the end of the King’s supper, Louis often consumed 30 different dishes, all washed down with enormous amounts of wine. While he ate, hundreds of courtiers passed slowly in front of the king’s table, watching him eat in reverent silence. The entire gluttonous display took less than one hour.
 
Needless to say, when the Louis XIV says dinner is the main meal and it starts at 10 PM…well, dinner is the main meal now and it starts at 10 PM. Practically overnight, centuries of tradition around heavy lunches and light, early suppers disappeared. For the king, a moderate lunch with a very long break was critical if he was going to work up such a legendary appetite as his feasts required. For the upper classes – whose lives were dictated by the Sun King, not the actual sun – refueling halfway through the working day and getting to bed early wasn’t a priority. But over time, of course, even the hoi polloi pick up on the habits at the palace, and over the next 200 years these royal mealtime shifts trickled down to even the bourgeoisie. While the average French person didn’t go so far as to chow down at 10 PM, the dinner hour crept further and further past the traditional 6 PM time slot. By the age of Napoleon, a dinner in France was a solid 8 PM affair. The problem was, most French people weren’t eating like Louis XIV. Sure, when you’re doing a One Meal A Day diet and that One Meal is 47,000 calories, you can afford to put 8 hours or more in between lunch and dinner. But the average French person now found themselves doing an involuntary sort of intermittent fasting, and those with high calorie needs were struggling to make it through the day. Somewhere in the midst of this transition, the French developed a solution: le goûter. What is le goûter? It’s an afternoon tea. It’s a little something special to get you through the day. It’s a small bit of food, something a bit rich and sweet, to tide you over during the long 8 hours between lunch and dinner. But is it a snack? Oh heavens, no. Didn’t I tell you? The French do NOT snack. They simply faire goûter. They have a taste. And when it’s time to figure out what food they’re not snacking on, French households reach to a classic. A standby. The perfect little something. La madeleine.
 
 
Nobody really knows where madeleines come from. There are three different mythical origin stories, but who knows if even one of them is correct? Everything I’m about to discuss is pure speculation, folklore, and culinary myth, but it’s tasty and evocative myth, so pourquoi pas?The most popular stories, however, all trace back to the small town of Commercy, located in that historical hot potato, Alsace-Lorraine. Commercy sits along one of the most famous footpaths in the world: the Camino de Santiago de Campostela. The Camino de Santiago was one of the most important pilgrimage routes of the Middle Ages, a literal path to glory, which promised spiritual growth – and perhaps a better shot at making it into heaven. According to legend, after the apostle James was martyred in Jerusalem, his disciples put his body in a boat and rowed him out to sea, eventually landing in the the city of Santiago de Compostela. The chance to visit the resting place of an actual apostle was irresistible! All over Europe, pilgrims walked out their front door and hit the road, walking for weeks or months or even years at a time, eventually making their way to Spain. Every year, as many as 250,000 people – almost all of whom were illiterate, made their way across thousands of miles of unfamiliar territory. In order to navigate, the pilgrimage routes were dotted with the traditional symbol of Saint James: a scallop shell. Why the scallop? Well, just like that novelty shot glass you picked up in Cabo last year, pilgrims wanted some kind of souvenir to remember their trip. When they’d reach the end of the journey, most pilgrims would make their way past Santiago de Campostela to the beach, where St James’s boat supposedly washed ashore, and slip a seashell into their pocket. “I walked 1000 miles across unpaved roads without knowing how to read,” you can almost hear them say, “and all I got was this lousy seashell.” But those seashells worked: all along the vast network of main routes and side routes, seashell signs and statues and tiles and mosaics helped keep the pilgrims on track. In an age when most people never made it 10 miles from their own house, following the seashells allowed millions of Europeans to make the trip of a lifetime. Almost all of the pilgrims would make their way through France to get there, and the French certainly seized the opportunity. Like whistle-stop towns springing up next to newly laid railroad tracks in the Wild West, villages hustled to serve the needs of the thousands of pilgrims passing through: need a bed for the night? need supplies? need a sacred amulet to keep you protected on the road? and of course: need something to eat? In Commercy, so the story goes, the local women saw a perfect opportunity: a small little cake for the pilgrims, baked inside one of those iconic seashells, just the right size to carry in one’s hand on the road.
 
Unlike so many other iconic French pastries, the madeleine is a simple, humble affair. Madeleines are essentially a tiny pound cake, made of equal parts flour and butter, a whole bunch of honey, with a few eggs thrown in. These aren’t the province of a master pastry chef – but they sound like the handiwork of some enterprising local housewives. Madeleines make perfect business sense as an easy treat which you can make in vast quantities for the masses of pilgrims passing through town. So, according to legend, the madeleine was born.
 
But how did the madeleine become famous? The great pilgrimage routes of the Middle Ages began petering out as everyone got distracted by things like the Renaissance, the printing press, and the exciting arrival of chocolate. The madeleine may have faded into local obscurity, a regional treat reserved for special occasions. Whatever fond memories of those tiny cakes may have lingered in the minds of the old pilgrims, they didn’t include any recipes. Instead, the madeleine would hit the big time through a more modern channel: influencers.
 
[PICK UP THE STORY HERE]
In the 1750s, Commercy gained a very prestigious new neighbor: Stanislaus I, the deposed king of Poland and the father-in-law of the King, Louis XV. Despite his habit of getting invaded and kicked off the throne, Stanislaus I was well-respected, a very learned gentleman who eventually gave up on his inheritance and settled in Alsace Lorraine to write books and study the sciences and get into polite arguments with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all while hosting guests at his beautiful chateau outside Commercy.
 
One night, the legend goes, disaster struck: after a terrible argument in the kitchens, Stanislaus’s pastry chef stormed out into the night, without even having the good graces to prepare dessert first. Quelle horreur! It couldn’t have happened on a worse night – the king himself, Louis XV, was dining at the chateau that night, looking forward to good conversation and tasty treats with his father-in-law. While the kitchen staff panicked, a young woman named Madeleine Paulmier quietly stepped forward. There was no time for elegant patisserie or time-consuming jellies. Madeleine rolled up her sleeves and whipped up a batch of her own family recipe – her grandmother’s sweet little seashell sponge cakes. Could such a dessert possibly be fit for not one but two kings?
 
After dessert, Stanislaus sent word to the kitchen: send out whoever was responsible for tonight’s dessert. Out stepped the young woman, confused and nervous, hands still covered in flour. 
 
“What is the name of this masterpiece?” asked the king.
“It has no name, your majesty,” replied the servant girl. “We just bake these on festival days in Commercy.”
“And what is your name?” the king replied.
“Madeleine Paulmier”
“Then we shall name them after you: the Madeleines de Commercy”
 
As the story tells it, Louis XV and his wife, the very popular Queen Marie, daughter of Stanislaus, loved the little cakes they tasted that night. They enjoyed them so much, in fact, that they brought the cakes all the way back to the court of Versailles for their own chefs to inspect and recreate. Naturally, if King Louis XV loved a food, the court of Versailles soon loved it, too. And if a new food was all the rage at Versailles, it was only a matter of time before that food became the hot ticket around Parisian society at large. Whatever the origins of the little cake may be, whether they were born out of a pilgrim’s progress or a King’s pantry, they remained by and large a regional delicacy, a well-appreciated but not particularly famous or beloved treat, for the next hundred years. A few decades after that dinner in Commercy, Louis XV’s grandson inherited the throne, did a rather poor job of it and plunged the nation into a great revolution. Those famous rising bread prices didn’t just crush the baguette bakers – with flour so dear, people were hardly whipping up little madeleines in the kitchen. “Let them eat cake,” indeed. It wasn’t until the 1850s that the modern madeleine we know and love today really swept the nation – and it did so thanks to another kind of revolution entirely.
 
Until the 19th century, the only way to acquire a metal baking pan was to swing by the artisan’s workshop. Aluminum was so rare, precious and hard to refine that it cost more than gold and silver. Cast iron was a recent invention, and pretty expensive, so if you purchased anything made of cast iron it was likely to be a workhorse tool for the kitchen – a skillet, a cauldron, or a baking sheet. Then, as now, French bakers and pastry artists preferred cookware made of copper, but it had to be hammered into shape by skilled artisans, driving the price of each piece up to the heavens. When Louis XIV’s servants rolled out a molded cake, they weren’t just showing off how much sugar the king of France could buy – they were showing off the fine quality of the cookware his kitchens could afford. All of this is to say, unless you were in business producing them for a living, most households weren’t going to lay out serious cash for a scalloped baking pan just to make their favorite treat. These beautifully crafted baking molds – and the newly invented kitchen range, which offered stable temperature control and lighter-textured cakes – belonged squarely in the domain of royal kitchens. The most famous kitchen of them all belonged to Talleyrand, the famous French statesman. Inside, one of the greatest geniuses in French history invented an entirely new grammar of baking. Antonin Carême, the father of French cuisine, is also the father of French patisserie. In 1815, he published Le patisserie royal parisien and Le patisserie pittoresque, which set a standard for pastry arts that remains essentially unchanged to this day: towering creations of choux pastry, custard creams, spun sugar, molded chocolate – the most elaborate, outrageous possible desserts, fit for aristocrats living in a wealth empire. The Paris-Brest, the gateau Saint-Honoré, the classic strawberry tart – pastries were now elevated so high above the materials and the ingredients available to the common cook that home baking in France started to simply…die out. As the food historian Nicola Humble puts it, “French patisserie is essentially a professional matter. The French have little tradition of home baking.” Why bother making a cake, when an artisan on the corner can make you a little miracle? While Carême and his disciples used precious ingredients, artisanal cookware, and a fleet of kitchen assistants to realize their pastry dreams, the average early 19th century French housewife still worked with an unruly chimney, one or two rudimentary cooking vessels, and a lot of elbow grease. 
 
But then came the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly, the markets flooded with copper and tin ore. Cast iron became cheap and easy. Mass production lowered the price of consumer home goods. The Atlantic slave trade poured sugar into Europe like never before, while global trade ushered in tons of tea from China. Suddenly, the traditional French kitchen looked unrecognizable. The author of that medieval guide, The Housekeeper of Paris, wouldn’t know where they were at all! A housewife had access to professionally milled flour and more sugar than her grandmother would have purchased in a lifetime. She had access to miraculous new baking soda and baking powder, so she no longer had to spend 45 minutes beating eggs with a whisk to get something to rise. Best of all? She had stuff. So much stuff! Teapots and sugar bowls and tongs and sugar and tea to go in them, forks and spoons, and above all, she had baking tins. Oh, did she have a lot of baking tins! As anyone who’s ever watched the Victorian episodes of the Great British Bake Off knows, 19th century Europeans were obsessed with sculpting their food, because for the first time they could afford to do so! They didn’t need a handcrafted copper masterpiece – they could pick up an elaborate tin or cast iron mold at the store. Suddenly, anyone could make an aspic, a jelly, a food shaped like another food, and, of course, a molded cake. But just because they could, didn’t necessarily mean they did. In Britain, with its long history of home baking, women cranked out plum puddings and Savoy cakes in distinctive shapes. But in France, most of these culinary innovations went to improving dinner, not dessert. If they wanted a showstopper on the table, they would buy one at the patisserie on the corner like everybody else. But as always, there’s an exception to the rule. French women don’t bake desserts, when they can just buy them instead. But what if you want something for that other meal? The secret meal? The meal that isn’t a meal? What if you want something for – dare I say it – a snack?
 
By the turn of the twentieth century, the stage was set. Mealtimes were fixed, and thanks to Louis XIV, they were spread far apart: early breakfast, a large supper at noon, and an endless hungry desert stretching out until 8 PM. French children now attended public schools, and the late afternoon sparked a mass migration as les enfants shuffled home at the end of the schoolday. Lest you think French children have some preternatural metabolism which prevents they from getting cranky when their blood sugar drops, French women knew exactly what their children needed to get them through until dinner: le gouter. Not a snack, mind you. Just a small, sweet treat to help stave off hunger in between meals. You know, that kind of thing. Before long, le gouter was as much a refined, unassailable tradition as the other three official meals. It was more than a meal – it was a ritual. Le gouter always happened at 4 in the afternoon. Le gouter was optional for adults, but absolutely necessarily for children. Le gouter was something small. And above all else, le gouter was always, always sweet. So what is a French mother at the turn of the twentieth century to do? She has a household of cranky, hungry children expecting their daily sweet. She doesn’t really do any home baking, but she isn’t going to waste money buying a Paris Brest every day for a 6 year old who won’t appreciate it anyway. She needs something she can whip up in a jiffy, using ingredients she already has on hand. She needs something that won’t take very long. At long last, the moment of the madeleine arrived. The average French woman in 1900 would have turned to her favorite cookbook, the popular La Cuisiniere de la campagne et de la ville by Louis-Eustache Audot. Inside, she’d find a simple recipe: butter, sugar, lemon zest, eggs, a bit of orange blossom water, and flour. Mixing everything together for a few minutes, she’d spoon the batter into her mass-produced baking tin, with its delightful, distinct seashell forms. In just ten minutes, the perfect little madeleines would emerge from the oven, warm, sweet, and just the right size for the snack-that-wasn’t-a-snack. A little basket of steaming madeleines, with a cup of tea: the perfect gouter. An entire generation of children came to associate the late afternoon with a warm scalloped cake. And one day, in 1913, a young new author immortalized this sacred association between madeleines and motherly love. In the first volume of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust’s narrator finds himself transported through time by the unexpected sense memory of a madeleine:
 
“One day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. 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…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…And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray, when I used to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.”
 
For Marcel, as for so many millions of French children, the madeleine was the taste of home. In a country of elaborate, professional pastries baked by strangers, the madeleine represented that rare homespun treat. An essential element of that four pm ritual meal that is not a snack, madeleines continue to get hungry children through to dinnertime to this day. While the French may insist with a straight face that they do not snack, the popularity of the beloved afternoon madeleine persists. When it comes to le gouter, the old chestnut rings true: Let them eat cake.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! This week, if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend signing up for The Land of Desire newsletter at thelandofdesire.substack.com – that’s thelandofdesire. s u b s t a c k .com. Why? Because I’m going to share my favorite madeleine recipe with you! Like millions of others, I’m a stress-baker, and These Uncertain Times mean I’ve spent a large part of 2020 in the kitchen, and a lot of that time has been spent making madeleines. They’re simple, delicious, and really fun to make. So order a baking tin online, it’s 12 bucks well spent, keep an eye on your inbox for my recipe, and give them a try this weekend. When you do, please, share your pictures with me! You can post them on Facebook, or tag thelandofdesire in an Instagram post, or just send me an email. Let’s celebrate together with a little podcast birthday cake – and until next time, au revoir!

Sources:

Further Reading:

  • I made a whole list on Bookshop of my favorite French food books!
  • Sigh. Sometimes you finish putting your finishing touches on an episode…and discover an entire treasure trove of rich information about your subject that you somehow failed to uncover after weeks of research. This would be a different episode if I’d come across the following (brilliant) essay earlier: How Marcel Proust killed the Commercy madeleine
  • Cake: A History by Nicola Humble is FASCINATING. She made me re-think the entire idea of what it means for something to be a cake. Super recommended, discovering this book was one of the highlights of researching this episode.
  • Turns out I wanted to know more about antique French copper cookware? Maybe you do, too.

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