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Madeleine Cakes
To one table-spoonful of flour add four of cream and three yolks of eggs, with two table-spoonfuls of pounded sugar. Put the mixture on a slow fire, and let it just come to a boil, then set aside to cool. Have ready some puff-paste rolled as thin as half-a-crown. Cut in half, and on one half spread the above preparation rather thinly, then cover with the other half. Glaze it with egg spread with a brush; bake in a quick oven, and when done cut it into equal-sized pieces the shape of an ordinary spongecake. Sift coarsely-powdered sugar over them, and glaze with a salamander or red-hot shovel, so that they may look candied on top.
This is not the shell-shaped French madeleine but a puff-paste slice filled with a thin pastry cream and glazed on top. Two things decide whether it works: how thoroughly you cook the flour in the custard, and how thin you spread it.
- The custard is the hingeOne tablespoon of flour to four of cream and three yolks makes a rich, egg-heavy pastry cream rather than a thin one. Whisk it constantly over low heat and let it reach a bare boil so the flour loses its raw taste and sets the yolks; pull it off the moment it thickens, then cool it completely. Warm filling will soften the butter layers in the paste before it ever reaches the oven.
- Pounded sugarPounded sugar is broadly the equivalent of caster or superfine sugar. The "coarsely-powdered sugar" sifted over the top at the end is coarser, closer to granulated, and the recipe wants it to melt under the salamander so the tops look candied.
- "Thin as half-a-crown"The coin was on the order of 1.5-2 mm thick, so roll the puff paste to about that, or roughly a sixteenth of an inch. Chill the sheets before assembling and cutting.
- A quick oven425-450F. Puff paste needs the initial blast to turn its water to steam; a moderate oven gives you a flat, greasy slab. Bake on parchment, and expect 15-20 minutes.
- Spread thinly, and leave a borderA thick layer of this wet filling will boil out at the edges. A scant film, with half an inch clear all round, and press the two sheets together at the margin.
- Salamander or red-hot shovelBoth are period tools for browning sugar from above without cooking what is underneath. A kitchen blowtorch is the direct equivalent; an overhead broiler, watched closely, will also do it.
- Egg glazeBrush the top sheet only, and keep the egg off the cut edges, which seals the layers and stops them rising.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of paste, so the yield cannot be fixed from the text. "An ordinary spongecake" here most likely means a small individual cake, not a modern layer cake.
The name travelled a long way from its origin. The French madeleine, the little ribbed shell cake of Commercy in Lorraine, is traditionally attributed to a servant or cook called Madeleine, a story generally repeated rather than documented, and it was already famous in France by the early nineteenth century. In English cookery books, "madeleine" came to be applied loosely to any small, elegant, French-flavoured cake: darioles lined with jam and coconut in some books, and here a layered puff-paste slice much closer to a mille-feuille or a Napoleon. What holds the family together is not the shape but the aspiration -- pastry cream, fine sugar, a glazed top, the vocabulary of the professional French pâtissier translated for a household kitchen that owned a salamander or, failing that, a coal shovel it was willing to heat in the fire.