Not many people have read Proust, even if they quote the title as À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, rather than In Search of Lost Time. It’s long; and I mean LONG, seven volumes, each thick as a thief. It’s boring – there are no pictures or conversations; ‘and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?' But seriously, it is what the critics describe as ‘voluptuous prose’ at a ‘languid pace’: bo-RING to you and me.
Still, everyone knows about the madeleines, a bite of which revoked memories and took M. Proust back to when he first – or most memorably – tasted it. I don’t know which; I’ve not read it.
The literary association might suggest that the little cake is the wonder of wonders, the be-all and end-all of the pastry world – or maybe it’s just me who thought so? It isn’t; and wasn’t portrayed thus in the Lost Time (I’ve now read the relevant bit). The significance is philosophical: what constitutes a memory; and how taste or smell can trigger the magic of launching us immediately back into the past.
Still, the cookie is delightful and the batter, as per the original Michel Roux' recipe, silly easy to mix. Eggs, sugar, butter, flour and a lemon – that’s what makes a meltingly sweet and tender biscuit.
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1