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Madeleine Au Rhum
Break four fresh eggs in a copper basin, add four ounces sugar and sharply beat up with a whisk for fifteen minutes; add four ounces sifted flour with three tablespoons rum and gently mix with a skimmer for one minute. Add two ounces clarified butter, a saltspoon baking powder, and mix again for half a minute. Lightly butter a pastry tin, line the bottom with a sheet of white paper, then pour in the preparation and set in a moderate oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, turn the madeleine upon a table, take off the paper, cut it into six even pieces, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is a whole-egg sponge in the genoise manner, baked as one cake and cut into portions — not the shell-shaped little cakes the name now brings to mind. Nearly everything depends on the initial whisking.
- The hinge: the egg foamBeyond a token saltspoon of baking powder, the lift here is air, so the fifteen minutes of sharp beating is the recipe. Whip eggs and sugar until the mixture triples and holds a thick ribbon off the whisk — three to five minutes in a stand mixer, or set the bowl over barely simmering water and whisk to lukewarm first to build volume faster.
- Why a copper basinUnlined copper was the professional whisking bowl because its surface helps stabilise egg foam and it warms quickly over a flame. A stainless or glass bowl works; avoid plastic, which holds grease and kills the foam.
- Weights, not cupsFour ounces sugar is about 115 g (a scant 2/3 cup) and four ounces flour about 115 g (a bit under 1 cup, spooned). This is one of those recipes where a scale is worth using, since the flour-to-egg ratio is what keeps it tender.
- A saltspoonRoughly a quarter teaspoon. Baking powders of this period were single-acting rather than double-acting; a quarter teaspoon in a properly aerated batter is still fine, and more will give a coarse crumb.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F (175C). Twenty minutes implies a fairly shallow cake — a tin of roughly 8 or 9 inches is a reasonable guess, though none is specified; test with a skewer, as a genoise dries out quickly once it is past done.
- Folding, not mixingThe "skimmer" is a flat perforated spoon used as a folding tool. Sift the flour over the foam in two or three additions and fold with a spatula; the clarified butter goes in last, warm but not hot, poured down the side of the bowl so it does not sink and deflate the batter.
- The pastry tin and paperAny shallow round or square cake tin will do; for the sheet of white paper, use parchment. Butter the tin, lay in the parchment, and butter that too — this sponge sticks.
- Yield and servingSix portions, as written. Serve the day it is baked; genoise stales fast, and a common remedy is to brush the cut cake with more rum, or with a rum syrup, before dusting with sugar — though this recipe asks only for the sugar.
The madeleine is generally traced to Commercy in Lorraine, and tradition — repeated more often than it is documented — credits a servant or cook named Madeleine with the original small shell-shaped cakes. By the late nineteenth century the word had loosened considerably in professional French kitchens, and here it means simply a plain whole-egg sponge, baked in one tin and cut up, of the family that includes genoise and gateau de Savoie. That drift is typical of the grand-hotel cookery this book records: an international restaurant repertoire in which a French name signalled a style and a finish (the rum, the powdered sugar, the folded napkin on the serving dish) rather than a fixed regional formula. The rum itself points to the same world, where rum, kirsch and maraschino were the standard flavourings of the pastry station.