Madeleines

[food_techie]

What are madeleines, is it a biscuit, and what is its history and origin?

[Tony Monero]

Yhey are more like individual cakes that have sea shell shape on one side and smooth on the other and you cook them in a madeleine tray to get the shape (these can be bought quite easily in different sizes). They are French. My 'Larousse Gastronomique' states that they originated in 1755 in Commercy and the duke loved a certain cake made by a peasant girl called Madeleine, hence the name.

[Cetti]

The English version is made in little castle moulds, and when cold covered in raspberry or apricot jam, rolled in coconut and topped with a splodge of fondant icing and half a glace cherry.

[Elfin]

Agreed Cetti.  My mum used to make them - little sponge inverted bucket-shaped cakes rolled in red jam then dessicated coconut.  Used to love the glace cherry on top but she also used angelica , which us kids always removed first cos we didn't like it!

[Cetti]

And if we were really  posh we had  angelica and  a red cherry perched on each cake which looked like  little flowers!

Ah, sweet memories!

[Xena1973]

18th Century - 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 monastaries 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 girl name Madeleine made them for Stanislas Leszczynska, the deposed king of Poland when he was exiled to Lorraine. This started the fasion for madeleines' (as they were named by the Leszczynska). They became popular in Versailles by his daughter Marie, who was married to Louis XV (1710�1774). 1923 - They were made famous by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in his autobiographical novel � la recherche du temps perdu, translated Remembrance of Things Past. This novel was left unfinished upon his death, and his brothers published the book in 1923. He wrote:

[smudge]

i used to love Madeleines, but then any kind of coconut cake is good enuff for me!