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The Pâtisserie That gives you Pause For Thought, France, 18th century

Make your own madeleines

This small sponge cake is an iconic part of French baking, but is believed to have originated in the kitchens of Stanisław I, the deposed king of Poland. As the father-in-law of King Louis XV of France, Stanisław lived in exile at the Château de Commercy in Lorraine. One of his chefs, Madeleine Paulmier, supposedly created the little shell-shaped cakes, which were subsequently named in her honour. Louis and his wife tasted them in Lorraine and introduced them to court, where they soon took off like – ahem – hot cakes. However, another version of the legend claims they were created in the kitchens of famed diplomat, Prince Talleyrand.

If either of these claims to fames wasn’t enough to secure the cake’s place in French culture, the novelist Marcel Proust elevated them in his 1907 masterwork, In Search of Lost Time. In it, the narrator experiences flashbacks to his childhood after the “exquisite pleasure” of dunking a madeliene in a cup of tea. An ‘episode of the madeleine’ is now a byword for a sensory cue that triggers an involuntary memory in French.