French culinary expression: CRY LIKE A MADELEINE

57961 Views 26/02/2023 0 comments Posted By: Emmanuel Poulet-Harmel In: Blog of gourmets

You dip the little blond cake, with its finely molded grooves, into your cup of tea, and as you bring it to your mouth, it lets out fine droplets. So this is what this madeleine who cries in the Proustian mode suggests to you...

It was said, in the twelfth century, "to make the Madeleine" to designate someone who affected to repent, by reference to the repentant sinner,  native of the town of Magdala, in Galilee, who came to wet the feet of Jesus with her tears, as the Gospel reports (Luke, VII, 36).

It is to this that we should trace our expression, which appeared in the 19th century - which was also marked by the creation of the little "madeleine cake" by a very talented cook, Madeleine Paumier.

If today we have no difficulty in grasping the meaning of the phrase (to cry profusely, with hot tears), we nevertheless spontaneously tend to attach it to the little cake, because of the indefinite article "a" which accompanies it, giving the impression that it is a question of some kind of madeleine, and because of the frequent omission of the capital letter, certain authors being able to go, like Balzac, so far as to decline the phrase in the plural, "like des Madeleines " !