Madeleine (cake)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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In In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust ruminated on the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the "episode of the madeleine".

1. A small gateau or sponge cake, often shaped like an elongated scallop shell.
   • 1981, CK Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, translating Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, Folio Society 2005, p. 44:

     And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray [...] my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

   • 2003, Emily Luchetti, A Passion for Desserts, Chronicle Books 2003, p. 20:

     Madeleine batter can be made in advance and refrigerated.

2. Something which brings back a memory; a source of nostalgia or evocative memories (used with reference to its function in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time).
   • 2001, James Carroll, Constantine's Sword, Houghton-Mifflin 2001, p. 223:

     The Robe was thus fixed in my mind as a symbol, and in my memory as a madeleine, of Jewish evil.

   • 2005, Roger Ebert, Rogert Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2005, p. 784:

     Every five years or so, in the middle of another task, I'll look at them and a particular cover will bring memory flooding back like a madeleine.

The Proust connection

Madeleines are perhaps most famous outside France for their association with involuntary memory in the Marcel Proust novel In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator experiences an awakening upon tasting a madeleine dipped in tea:

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 than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…

— Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1: Swann's Way.

"Et tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu. Ce goût, c’était celui du petit morceau de madeleine que le dimanche matin à Combray (parce que ce jour-là je ne sortais pas avant l’heure de la messe), quand j’allais lui dire bonjour dans sa chambre, ma tante Léonie m’offrait après l’avoir trempé dans son infusion de thé ou de tilleul. La vue de la petite madeleine ne m’avait rien rappelé avant que je n’y eusse goûté ; peut-être parce que, en ayant souvent aperçu depuis, sans en manger, sur les tablettes des pâtissiers, leur image avait quitté ces jours de Combray pour se lier à d’autres plus récents ; peut-être parce que, de ces souvenirs abandonnés si longtemps hors de la mémoire, rien ne survivait, tout s’était désagrégé ; les formes — et celle aussi du petit coquillage de pâtisserie, si grassement sensuel sous son plissage sévère et dévot — s’étaient abolies, ou, ensommeillées, avaient perdu la force d’expansion qui leur eût permis de rejoindre la conscience. Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir." [1]