Madeleines de Commercy With the autumn are back madeleines, small sweet and noble tradition. Their history?
Stanislaus Leszczy ński, exiled king of Poland, Duke of Lorraine , had established his residence in Commercy and Luneville (with a beautiful courtyard and a vibrant cultural life). In 1755 at a celebration held in 1755 in Castle Commercy, one of the attendants, Madeleine Paulmier, had prepared a traditional sweet dessert of the place (made from flour, eggs, sugar and butter ), the original form of a shell, in which the King gave the name of Madeleine de Commercy. Being the daughter of Stanislaus, Leszczy ńska Maria, Queen of France, wife of Louis XV from 1725, the sweet reached the halls of Versailles and, later, one of the pastry chefs will Stanislaus began commercial production is in its form authentic, come down to us. Another moment of fame for madeleines was what they had for the inauguration of the railway Paris-Strasbourg (1852) by Napolone III, when the imperial court in Commercy stopped for lunch, where they towered as a typical product of the place.
Another tradition links the madeleines origin of the pilgrimage to Saint-Jacques de Compostella (around the ninth century.) Opportunity for a girl named Madeleine, of offer the pilgrims this cake (molded in the shell Saint-Jacques, emblem of the pilgrimage). The two stories, however, can not be in conflict if, as mentioned, the cake prepared by Paulmier was already in the tradition of the place.
But the fame of madelaines is indisputably linked to Recherche Proust. Marcel, a famous page in the book, he speaks as an example of "involuntary memory, triggered by" these short and sweet plump calling Petites madelaines and who seem molded in the fluted valve of a "scallop" '. The taste of a madeleine back to childhood in Combray Proust: the memories of that time seemed broken down, nothing survived, "the forms - including that of the small shell of pastry, so fat sensual under its severe and pious pleating - had disappeared; but then thanks to that taste, he, in the coincidence of past and present, escapes the transience of time and can sense the essence of things. The "resurrection" of Cambray thus allows it to start "the pious pilgrimage in search of lost time and truth, a route that - unlike what happened in the Middle Ages - does not involve any mortification sensitivity, but rather enhances its value. Devoted and sensual, therefore, a paradox is only apparent in extreme condensation which contains the meaning of the book "(from a comment by Alberto Beretta Anguissola the side of Swann ).
Our poor children did not know madeleines to recall, but the richest maturity makes us go back to reading Proust. It is no small thing: he had the same Proust, said that "life finally rediscovered and illuminated, the single life, therefore, fully lived, is literature"?
(photo from Wikipedia)