Madeleines

It is said that madeleines, small cockleshell-shaped sponge cakes, were invented in the last century by Madeleine Palmier, a Commercy pastry chef, and the town still bakes them in prodigious numbers to export to the rest of France. Few people have read Marcel Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swam, but many know of his famous reference to the vivid memory of taking tea with his Aunt Léonie as a child, brought