Home › The World's Kitchen › Madeleine with Almonds
Madeleine with Almonds
Break four fresh eggs in a copper basin, add four ounces of sugar, a teaspoon vanilla essence and two ounces finely chopped, peeled almonds. Briskly beat up with a whisk for fifteen minutes and add very gradually four ounces sifted flour, continually mixing meanwhile. Add three ounces clarified butter, a half teaspoon baking powder, and gently mix with a skimmer for a half minute. Line the bottom of a small pastry tin with a lightly buttered paper, drop the preparation into the tin, neatly smooth the surface, then set in a moderate oven to bake for twenty-five minutes. Remove, let cool off, turn upon a table, lift up the paper, cut the madeleine into six even pieces, sprinkle a little fine sugar over, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is a genoise-style almond sponge baked in one tin and cut into bars, not the shell-shaped cakes the name now suggests. The whole thing stands or falls on how much air you beat into the eggs.
- The hinge: whip the eggs to the ribbonFifteen minutes of hand-whisking in a copper basin is what leavens this cake; the half teaspoon of baking powder is only insurance. In a stand mixer, whip whole eggs and sugar 6-8 minutes on high until pale and thick enough to fall from the whisk in a ribbon that sits on the surface for a few seconds.
- Copper basinCopper is traditionally credited with stabilising beaten egg, though the effect is best documented for whites; a warm bowl matters more in practice. Set the eggs and sugar over barely simmering water and whisk until lukewarm to the touch, then whip off the heat. Any clean metal or glass bowl works.
- Moderate ovenThe original gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read as around 350F / 175C. At twenty-five minutes a shallow sponge of this size should be set and springy; start checking at twenty.
- Weights and panFour ounces of sugar is about 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons; four ounces of flour is roughly 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons, better weighed at 115 g. Three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons before clarifying. "A small pastry tin" is vague, but the batter suits an 8-inch square or a 9x5 loaf pan, filled no more than two-thirds.
- Peeled almondsBlanched almonds, skins slipped off. Chop them fine by hand rather than grinding to flour, or they will weigh the batter down; toasting them first is not in the original but sharpens the flavour.
- Clarified butterMelt the butter, skim the foam, and pour off the clear fat leaving the milky solids behind. Add it lukewarm, not hot, or it will deflate the foam. Drizzle it down the side of the bowl over the folded batter rather than dumping it in the centre.
- The skimmerA wide perforated spoon, used here as a folding tool. A rubber spatula does the same job. Half a minute is genuinely all you have before the foam starts to slacken, so fold decisively and stop as soon as no dry flour shows.
- Lining paperButtered parchment on the base only, so the sides can climb. Turn the cake out while still slightly warm and peel the paper off then, not cold.
- YieldSix bars, one small tin. "Fine sugar" sprinkled over is caster or a dusting of confectioners' sugar. Best the day it is baked.
The name is generally traced to Commercy in Lorraine, where small shell-moulded cakes called madeleines were sold to travellers from the eighteenth century onward and were later fixed in literary memory by Proust. What Filippini gives here is not that cake but a rich whole-egg sponge batter, close kin to genoise, baked in whatever tin was at hand and cut into portions; whether professional kitchens carried a separate and older sense of the word is not established. The lightly buttered paper, the copper basin, the skimmer and the folded napkin under the finished cake are all the vocabulary of the hotel kitchens Filippini worked in, where a pastry cook whipped by hand and judged an oven by feel.