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This probably should have been my first post, and definitely not something published randomly four months after the first post, but I guess in a pandemic year with four children at home 70% of the time, I can be somewhat excused – at least this is how I decided to think about it.
Indeed, I have some explaining to do regarding this madeleine business. It was hard enough for me to come up with a title for this blog, and I’m still not sure I like the way it sounds, but after a few weeks of racking my brain, it became clear that it needed to involve a madeleine somehow or another. I had been toying for a while with the idea of writing about the things that make the fabric and rhythms of my daily life: my children and the time I have spent and still spend with them, my home and my kitchen and the time I spend in them, loving and feeding this big family that I never imagined I would ever have and that has turned my life upside down over the past decade.
At first, I thought the blog should be about home, the space where I have spent most of my time since my first son was born over twelve years ago. I know I wanted to make sense of this time, which has been so ambivalent for me; a source of immense and unexpected joy but also loneliness, disorientation and shame, when most women and mothers around me seemed so accomplished and busy. This is still what this blog will be about, in direct or indirect ways, but I couldn’t find a way to tie everything together around this word of “home”. And I was still thinking about a food blog I kept in my late twenties, for a few months before I started writing my Ph.D. dissertation and slowly but surely stopped publishing any posts.
I was ambivalent from the start about sharing recipes anyway. I wanted to write about food and cooking and all the associations this had for me, without my site being categorized as a “food blog” that people could look up for weeknight dinner inspiration. I enjoyed, and still enjoy, cooking and smelling and having my hands in dough and mixing and creating textures and colors, but I wasn’t, and still am not, someone who creates recipes off the top of her head. To this day I still have a hard time veering off from a given recipe – ever the good student afraid of making a mistake and upsetting the professor. So, if you are looking for groundbreaking, creative cooking involving unknown, hard-to-find ingredients and bold new combinations of flavors, this definitely is not the place for you. In a way food writing for me is more about eating than it is about cooking. It is about the memories and images and feelings and sensations that a flavor stirs up, whether or not I created this flavor myself. It is about textures and materials and the physical world, and the most direct way we can experience it, by touching and smelling and yes, ingesting it.
I still had my doubts about food writing - or any kind of blog writing for that matter - and I had stopped thinking about all this altogether, when I came across a book in the Connecticut rental home where we spent Christmas last year, not being able to visit my family in France. I already mentioned The Modern Cook’s Year by Anna Jones and its Christmas Orecchiette, but the book that first caught my attention in that house was by Nigel Slater. It is a book I first came across over fifteen years ago while my husband and I were visiting London. I was immediately attracted by the cover and title and I promised myself I would order it as soon as we went back to the U.S., which I never did. So I was happy to see these Kitchen Diaries again, in its original edition with the vintage-looking apples on the cover, and as soon as I opened it I knew I had the structure for my blog. I have started many journals and diaries in my lifetime, and never quite followed up on any of these endeavors, so let’s hope that this one lasts more than two weeks. But I liked the idea of lazily following the rhythms of my days and embrace the chaos, confusion and joy that they always reserve me, by writing a “kitchen diary” that would include my children, as they have, quite surprisingly, become the center of my life since that early summer day in London.
What about the madeleine, will you ask? It was already on my mind as an obvious (probably too obvious) nod to Proust and the five years I spent writing about him as a graduate student, alone in the stacks of a New York college library. But suddenly it became clear that it would also be the childhood part of my blog, as a symbol of reminiscence and the “search of lost time” of course, but also, more simply, as a “goûter d’enfant”, the quintessential French cookie that Proust’s narrator dipped in his great-aunt Léonie’s tea as a little boy. To me, madeleines perfectly embody this reassuring “vieille France” of old country houses and musty lavender smells, an age-old vignette of grandmothers in shawls and creaking doors and porcelain tea sets, but also children running around and sitting briefly at the dining room table, wolfing down pastries before dashing off to new adventures. It is the cookie of children, of mothers and grandmothers, a maternal “petit gâteau” whose femininity is encapsulated in its very name and shape. Granted, my own house is a far cry from Léonie’s country estate - a rental apartment in a slightly decrepit Manhattan Pre-War building, where my four children are crammed into a space that is getting too small by the minute. But I like to think that this madeleine will bring me back to the France that I miss and long for, while reminding me of the joys and challenges of motherhood.
As for a recipe, I am not, as I already mentioned, a great inventor and creator of flavors, and I will simply share our family’s favorite, the chocolate-chip madeleines by Cyril Lignac, which I just unglamorously found, as most of my kitchen inspirations, via an Internet search engine. It is the easiest recipe in the world, and you can have your madeleines ready in 20 short minutes, for a simple but highly satisfactory Sunday “goûter” with your kids, or weekday afternoon tea by yourself (because you have deserved it). You can find a French version here, and the translation below:
Chocolate-chip madeleines (madeleines aux pépites de chocolat) by Cyril Lignac Ingredients (for 20 to 25 madeleines):
· 125 g butter
· 3 eggs
· 150 grams sugar
· 140 grams flour
· 1 teaspoon baking powder
· Vanilla extract
· 50 grams baking chocolate, or chocolate chips
Preparation:
Melt the butter on low heat and set aside. Placer le chocolat sur une planche à découper et, avec un gros couteau, le couper en morceaux plus ou moins réguliers de la taille d’un petit pois. Chop the chocolate in rough pea-size pieces (I personally just use store-bought chocolate chips which are just fine – I told, you, not a fancy blog).
In a mixing bowl, whip the eggs and sugar together. Add the flour, baking powder, a few drops of vanilla extract and mix for another minute. Add the melted butter and half the chocolate chips, mix again. Here the recipe says to let the mix rest for a few minutes, but I personally put it in the fridge overnight or at least an hour, as it is said to be the secret to get the famous madeleine “hump”.
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