Madeleine Cakes - History of Madeleine© copyright 2004 by Linda Stradley - United States Copyright TX 5-900-517- All rights reserved. This web site may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission and appropriate credit given. If you use any of the history information contained below for research in writing a magazine or newspaper article, school work or college research, and/or television show production, you must give a reference to the author, Linda Stradley, and to the web site What's Cooking America.
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Madeleine is a French form of Magdalen (Mary Magdalen, a disciple of Jesus, is mentioned in all four gospels).
Madeleines are always associated with the little French town of Commercy, whose bakers were said to have once, long ago, paid a "very large sum" for the recipe and sold the little cakes packed in oval boxes as a specialty in the area. Nuns in eighteenth-century France frequently supported themselves and their schools by making and selling a particular sweet. Commercy once had a convent dedicated to St. Mary Magdelen. Historians thing that the nuns, probably when all the convents and monasteries of France were abolished during the French Revolution, sold their recipe to the bakers. According to another story or legend, during the 18th century in the French town of Commercy, in the region of Lorraine, a young servant girl name Madeleine made them for Stanislas Leszczynska, the deposed king of Poland when he was exiled to Lorraine. This started the fashion for madeleines' (as they were named by the Leszczynska). They became popular in Versailles by his daughter Marie, who was married to Louis XV (17101774).
Another story lays the origins of the madeleine with Jean Avice, considered the “master of choux pastry,” who worked as a pastry chef for Prince Talleyrand (1754-1838. Jean Avice is said to have invented the Madeleine in the 19th century by baking little cakes in aspic molds.
1923 - They were made famous by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in his autobiographical novel À la recherche du temps perdu, translated Remembrance of Things Past, Volume 1, Swann's Way. This novel was left unfinished upon his death, and his brotherspublished the book in 1923. He wrote:
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