Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Madelienes
Madelienes
(Paris.) Beat 4 ounces butter with 3 ounces sugar, add the yolks of 4 eggs, a teaspoonful of orangeflower water, and the grated rind of a lemon, then add 4 ounces flour and the stiff whites of 4 eggs. Fill small pans, buttered, cover with split almonds and sifted sugar. Bake 1/2 hour in moderate oven.
A creamed-butter cake batter lightened with beaten whites, baked in small tins. The measurements are by weight, which makes them easier to follow than most recipes of the period.
- Weights into cups4 oz butter is one stick (1/2 cup); 3 oz sugar is about 6 to 7 tablespoons; 4 oz flour is roughly 3/4 cup plus 2 to 3 tablespoons. Weighing is more reliable here, since the batter depends on the fat and flour being in balance.
- Moderate oven350F. The tins should be buttered well and, if they are shell-shaped madeleine pans, floured too.
- Cut the time downHalf an hour will dry out small cakes at this size. Modern madeleine pans need 10 to 14 minutes; deeper little cake tins or a shallow muffin pan, 15 to 20. Bake until the edges brown and a skewer comes out clean.
- Folding the whitesThe whites are the only leavening: there is no baking powder. Beat them to a firm but not dry peak and fold in with the flour in two additions so the batter stays aerated.
- Orange-flower waterStill sold, usually as orange blossom water. A scant teaspoon is enough; more will taste of soap.
- Split almondsBlanched almonds halved lengthwise. Scatter them on the surface with a dusting of sugar before baking; they toast as the cakes rise.
- YieldAbout 18 to 24 small cakes, depending on the tins. They are best the day they are baked, while the edges are still crisp.
The madeleine is a cake of Lorraine, associated above all with Commercy, and the name is traditionally traced to a servant or cook called Madeleine said to have made them for the exiled Polish king Stanislas Leszczynski in the eighteenth century -- a tradition, not a documented fact. The shell shape most people now expect came with the ribbed tin plate mould, and this Paris version is indifferent to it: the instruction is simply to fill small buttered pans. The batter here is closer to a plain butter sponge, flavoured with lemon rind and orange-flower water in the older French manner, and the almonds and sugar on top belong to a period when a small cake was expected to arrive with its decoration already baked on. Its appearance in a collection of recipes gathered abroad is the point of such books: the traveller brought home the formula, not the pan.