In the multilingual metropolitan microcosm of the Lower East Side of youthful yore endearing expressions of enthusiasm were euphemistically engendered in "French". This boyhood recollection came to mind as one came across a press blurb (obviously written by a feverish Francophile) from Yale University Press announcing a centennial edition of literary modernist Marcel Proust's most famous and acclaimed work, À la recherche du temps perdu (or in plain English: In Search of Lost Time), which for some unfathomable reason is regarded by some, perhaps due to its languishing length, as "the greatest novel in all of French literature".
Ameliorating academic anemia is not the pious point of these meandering musings rather cultivating Catholic culture is, so therefore let us quoth from said sad scribe's scintillating spiel: "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."
The jolly genesis of the munchy madeleine is deeply disputed and an esteemed encyclopedia of Gallic gastronomy, the Larousse Gastronomique, relates two conflicting accounts of the cake’s invention. One story lays the pastry's parentage at the friendly feet of one Jean Avice, the “master of choux pastry,” who worked as a pastry chef for Prince Talleyrand. Avice is said to have ingeniously invented the madeleine in the 19th century by baking little cakes in aspic molds. Another appetizing account puts the origins of the madeleine earlier to the eighteenth century in the French town of Commercy, in the region of Lorraine, where a young servant girl named Madeleine made them for the deposed king of Poland Stanislas Leszczynska, 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.
Of course, the dainty delectable is ultimately named after the famous sister of Lazarus and Martha euphemistically entitled "The Penitent". Although Jewish by birth, since she lived in the northern Galilee town of Magdala she acquired the culture and manners of a Gentile. Saint Luke innocently mentions that Our Lord expelled seven devils from Mary immediately after the said Evangelist related the Pardon of the Sinful Woman thereby unintentionally creating perhaps the most, >ahem<, colorful unofficial patronage in Catholic hagiography. Fourteen years after the Ascension, so the Legenda Aurea relates, Magdalene, her maid Sara, Lazarus, Martha, Maximin (one of the Seventy Two Disciples), and Sidonius ("the man born blind"), along with the body of Saint Anne, were sent into exile in a boat sans sails and oars. The chancy caravel miraculously and happily landed upon the shores of southern France and thus began the electric evangelization of the eldest daughter of the Church. Retreating to a cave to spend the remainder of her days in prayer and penance Mary became the primogenetrix of the contemplatives.
And since we are not privileged as she was with the mystical gift of inedia, please pass those tasty treats!
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