Kids Cooking Workshop - Les Madeleines
Cooking workshops for grown-ups have already returned, now it's time for the KIDS!
Madeleine is a traditional small cake from Commercy and Liverdun, two communes of the Lorraine region in north-eastern France. It is spongy, with a distinctive shell-like shape acquired from being baked in pans with shell-shaped depressions. Several legends are attached to the "invention" of the madeleines, yet, there is no consensus. Some say that the inventor named Medeleine Paulmier, while some consider that it was cooked for Stanislaus I, duke of Lorraine in the 18th century.
The term Madeleine was first time appeared in France in the middle of the 18th century in the book of Menon, a French cookbook author (Les soupers de la Cour ou l’Art de travailler toutes sortes d’aliments). Madeleine is also found in the literary world. In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), Proust used madeleines to contrast involuntary memory with voluntary memory. It is also known as the “episode of the Madeleine”.
"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, 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 me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea...."
— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
