Dear Diary: Madeleines
It was a good day, even though I woke up late and took a while to get started. The first thing that I did when I sat down at my desk was to put together a playlist for the day. I didn’t try to make it perfect; I aimed, rather, for a list that would lend itself to improvement — to substitution, really. Instead of Karl Böhm’s late Mozart, how about Karajan’s. Instead of Locatelli’s Opus 1 (a new addition to the collection), maybe some more Sammartini, if and when I can find it. And what would happen if I stuck Ein Heldenleben where Romeo & Juliet is now?
As for the end of the day, I spent it in the kitchen. It has been ages since I spent an evening in the kitchen. I used to, all the time; but that was before The Daily Blague was a twinkle in my eye. My kitchen is no longer a hobby; it’s a utility. Just as I have a plan for paying the bills every month, so I need a kitchen management system that, while not interesting in itself, is easily operated. It consists, for the most part, in taking down the contents of half of two cabinet shelves and checking out the stuff on the top shelf of the refrigerator door — the shelf that’s held up with duct tape. (The refrigerator is not three years old, but that’s modern plastic for you. Kathleen promises me a superdeluxe, freezer-at-the-bottom refrigerator, but I don’t hold her to it; I’m managing all right as it is.)
When I was through with my dinner (spaghetti alla carbonara — my default kitchen dinner), I decided to make a batch of madeleines. I do love to bake, and madeleines have been a specialty of mine ever since my mother brought back two madeleine tins from a trip to Paris in the early Seventies. (Of course I had begged her to do so.) In those days, the Proustian experience was a strictly literary, and not at all culinary, phenomenon. Also, there was no Pam: you had to butter and flour the grooved molds one by one, and it was a royal chienne.
The interesting thing, I find, is that even the modern Silpat, allegedly nonstick, madeleine molds require Pam. So I don’t much use the full-sized molds that I’ve collected. When I make a batch of madeleines ordinaires, I use the those tins from Paris to make two dozen regular madeleines, and two Silpat forms to make about three dozen mini-madeleines. I keep the big ones, and send the minis to the office with Kathleen.
Baking these shell-shaped treats — they’re neither cakes nor cookies, but something in between — used to be an affectation, I’ll admit. But, by now, I’ve been making them rather longer than anybody of my age, and probably as often as anybody on earth who isn’t either paid to make them or slightly mad. At an early age, baking madeleines became something that I do. Connecting them with Proust has lapsed into an afterthought. But I do wonder what his grandmother at Illiers would have thought of mine. Woiuld she have detested the drop of lemon oil that, after wild experiment and variation, has become my only lasting interpolation to the recipe? It doesn’t much matter, because Kathleen adores it.