At My Kitchen Table: Madeleines

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It occurrs to me that the madeleine is no longer too radioactive to write about. Nobody will expect me to (a) explain what a madeleine is, (b) relate how the French novelist Marcel Proust made the madeleine what it is today,* (c) go into raptures about how the taste of a madeleine dunked in tea (Earl Grey, of course!) takes me right back to the dorm room in which I first read Swann’s Way, or (d) say anything at all that hasn’t been said already in most of the better-known languages. Nor is anyone likely to think that I’m trying to be recherché, either.

Madeleines are, above all, delicious.

The tins in the picture have been mine-all-mine since the early Seventies, when, amazingly, my mother actually granted a request and brought them back from a trip to Paris.

Madeleines.

* Or how long it took.

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