![]() There may be other people who will try experiments. LEVIN: I'm afraid that he made it all up. There is no madeleine with a reasonable recipe that behaves the way Proust says.ĬHADWICK: Edmund, you're talking about a writer who his entire career rests upon his ability to evoke tides of memory from small little stimuli, and you're saying he's lying about the stimuli? ![]() So my shocking conclusion is that Proust's madeleine could not have existed. I left them outside for three, four days, and I tried to dip them and I still got very few crumbs. LEVIN: Well, I tried leaving it out-it was kind of a heartless act I felt, but I made some madeleines. So what is your conclusion about Proust's legendary madeleine? Where do you come to here? Was it just stale? That could even mean that it was stale.ĬHADWICK: OK. LEVIN: Basic food science tells you that a madeleine that would behave like that would be drier, would have less butter, less eggs. Now the funny thing is when I started researching this, I thought, `Well, somebody must have tried to figure out what kind of madeleine would do this.' And to my surprise, I found that no one had taken the time and the effort to research this really utterly trivial question to find out exactly what the recipe would be to create a Proustian madeleine.ĬHADWICK: And how did you do? How did you go about that? What Proust's passage suggests is that the madeleine should kind of disintegrate a little bit in the tea. LEVIN: It is crumb-deficient because it is apparently not dry and crumbly enough. There are no crumbs in the spoon when you take your typical madeleine and soak a piece of it in the tea.ĬHADWICK: What is wrong with this madeleine that it is crumb-deficient? LEVIN: Well, you have the makings of an investigative food writer because that's the whole problem. LEVIN: And then to stir it a little bit and than what Proust describes is that the narrator then scoops out a spoonful of tea and there should be, according to the passage, crumbs in the spoon, and that's where the whole problem and mystery lies.ĬHADWICK: I have to say there are no crumbs in this spoon. and then you should break off, I'd say, about a third of it.ĬHADWICK: I note that this is a rather-well, it doesn't snap apart. ![]() Well, first, you should get into an appropriately pensive mood. And tell me what I should do to re-create Proust's epiphany. So now I have in front of me a cup of tea and a spoon and a madeleine this is one that we bought at Starbucks. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses.'ĬHADWICK: And from this moment, all these memories flow out because this moment is so magical. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. `I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. This is the cookie known as a madeleine, a shell-shaped confection that inspired French author Marcel Proust's legendary flood of memories in his work "Remembrance of Things Past." Our literary sleuth is Slate contributor and food writer Edmund Levin.Įdmund, welcome to DAY TO DAY and remind us exactly what Proust did with this madeleine and why there is a question about this cookie.ĮDMUND LEVIN (Slate): Well, in "Remembrance of Things Past" which is a 3,000-page novel, there is a scene in the book where the narrator, who is a fictionalized Marcel Proust, dips this madeleine in some tea, and the spoonful of tea mixed with crumbs is kind of the point where the novel reaches escape velocity and he has this flood of memories that spark the whole rest of the novel.ĬHADWICK: Read us just that passage, will you? ![]() Our partners at Slate magazine have published a piece that delves into one of the great literary mysteries of all time: how the cookie crumbles. Now with the results of a unique exercise in investigative reporting. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |