Madeleines By Julia Child Via Marsden’s Mother

My mother loved to entertain. And to cook. One of her triumphs was pork chops coated with Corn Flakes and baked in a slow oven. She could not make scrambled eggs without garlic and sour cream. And she became a big mover of TV dinners and Sara Lee chocolate cake as they entered the market in the late 1940s. She was fond of display:  She would wear ballet flats, one red, one green, a little red lizard hat with an elephant on the top and she added tiny Hawaiian orchids to her green salads and capers to most everything else.

So, in keeping with the hilarity of the season, her idea of a holiday fest was inviting a lot of people to her  apartment on East 91st Street and serving them  Manhattans, sliced salami, Kraft cheese, and cookies like date Lebkuchen, Hermits, Linzer Schnitten — all complex, lumpy, spicy sweets. My sister and I, at roughly ages 8 and 10, tested the Manhattans and passed on the cookies.

In time, a nurse mixed our mother a final Manhattan on her death bed, long after my sister and I had erased our culinary past. Jen  married a Brit and cooked Brit food. I married  another New Yorker and tried to cook like Julia Child.

So, this is the season for culinary sweets. Yes, I cooked pecan squares and such for  our sons, but in the main I tried to make food that was luxe, simple and beautiful, which is why I make Julia Child’s Madeleines at Christmas. Now, Julia says, this is the Madeleine from Commercy,  “the one Marcel Proust dipped in his tea.”  It is not like the tricky recipes with beaten egg whites that turn out light. Wispy, fragile really. This is a beautiful solid cookie flavored with lemon and vanilla and butter and shaped like a sea shell.

These are simple, beautiful and tasty. My mother would have lacquered them with chocolate or some sort of Cointreau icing.  But I love them the way they are.

Madeleines

24 of them from Julia Child’s “The Way To Cook,”
(a presumptuous title, I’d say but, after all, this is Julia).

2 large eggs

2/3 cup sugar

1 cup all-purpose flour (scooped and leveled as Julia usually prescribes) plus 1 tbs flour set aside

5 ounces sweet butter cut in 5 pieces

1 pinch of salt (fine kosher is good)

The grated rind of one lemon

Drops of lemon juice to taste

A few drops of good quality vanilla extract

And, finally, confectioners sugar

Mix the eggs and separate out 1/4 cup of them into a bowl.

Beat the sugar and flour into the original bowl of beaten eggs. Let rest for 10 minutes

Melt the butter and let it brown slightly.

Place the 1 tablespoon flour in a small bowl and blend in 1-1/2 tablespoons of melted butter. Set aside. This is for coating the madeleine pans. (shiny silver ones are best).

When the butter is cool but still fluid, blend it and the rest of the eggs into the flour mixture along with a pinch of salt, the lemon rind and juice and the vanilla flavor. This is called the batter, but it’s almost thick as dough.

Paint the Madeleine tins, probably two since the recipe is for 24 cookies, with the 1- 1/2 tablespoon melted butter mixed with the 1 tablespoon of flour using a pastry brush. Divide the dough into 24 walnut-sized lumps and drop each into the Madeleine hollows. 

Bake for about 15 minutes at 375 degrees. They will be “humped in the middle” as many recipes say, and browned around the edges. 

Unmold on a rack to cool,  turn over, ribbed side up and dust with confectioner’s sugar.