Madeleine History

As with most popular French foods, there are several different stories about the origin of madeleine cookies. According to one version, Madeleine was a young maid working for a Marquise in the late 1700's when she baked shell shaped tea cakes for a certain Stanislas Leczinski, the deposed king of Poland.

In another version, it was a different Madeleine who offered her cakes to voyagers making the pilgrimage to Saint Jacques burial site. Whoever made the first madeleine recipe had a good idea at any rate. For it wasn't long before several different enterprises had taken up making and marketing these small cakes.

The town of Commercy in the Lorraine region of eastern France is renowned for it's madeleines. From the end of the 19th century up until WWII, voyagers on the train through Commercy were entertained by the site of female cake vendors carrying their wares in big baskets, each yelling louder than the next in an attempt to sell the maximum number of her employer's madeleines.

This way of selling merchandise was unique within France at the time, and the spectacle of the ladies at Commercy was probably looked forward to by bored travelers.

The madeleine was then immortalized by Marcel Proust in his autobiographical book, Á la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), where a taste of the cake plunges the narrator back into his childhood. Since then, Proust's madeleine has become a metaphor in France for anything that creates a vivid memory.