Have in a bowl one pound of sugar, one pound of flour, ten egg-yolks and the peel of one lemon; mix well without beating and add a pound of melted butter and finally eight beaten egg-whites. Butter some long shell-shaped molds, flour over and fill three-quarters full with this preparation; strew sugar on top and bake in a medium oven. As soon as baked unmold on a wire grate and serve when cold.
Ranhofer's proportions are equal weights of sugar, flour and butter, leavened by nothing but beaten whites — a batter that punishes overmixing and rewards a hot mold. A few notes before you scale it down.
Madeleines are tied to Commercy, a small town in Lorraine on the Meuse, and by the nineteenth century vendors were selling them in oval wooden boxes to travelers passing through on the Paris–Strasbourg line. The origin story usually told — that a servant or cook named Madeleine improvised the cakes for Stanislas Leszczyński, the deposed Polish king who held the duchy of Lorraine in the mid-1700s, and that his daughter carried them to Versailles — is traditional rather than documented, and appears in print well after the fact. The ribbed shell is often said to echo the scallop badge of pilgrims on the road to Santiago, though that explanation for the long fluted mold is tradition rather than established fact. Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, files this among his "Small Cakes for Entremets" — the tray of little sweets sent out near the end of a long service — alongside plain madeleines, Genoese madeleines and a version with rum.