Brown Butter Madeleines

Brown butter, lemon zest, a batter that rests overnight in the fridge, and a thermal shock in a very hot oven that produces the distinctive hump. Made properly, they are one of the finest things a domestic kitchen can produce. Eaten warm, within twenty minutes of baking, they are not quite like anything else.

There is a single paragraph in the first volume of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu that has done more for the reputation of the madeleine than any baker in history. The narrator, returning home on a cold winter day, is given a cup of tea by his mother. With it, a small cake: “one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines.” He dips it into the tea. He raises it to his lips. And in the moment the warm, madeleine-flavoured liquid touches his palate, the whole of his childhood in Combray floods back to him — the grey house, his aunt’s room, the square, the street, the garden, the town itself — in an involuntary rush of memory that the passage of time and conscious effort had made entirely inaccessible. His aunt used to give him pieces of madeleine dipped in her lime-flower infusion every Sunday morning before mass. The taste had been waiting there all along, in the texture of the crumb and the warmth of the liquid, for the right moment to be unlocked.

Proust called this mémoire involontaire — involuntary memory — and it is the founding concept of one of the most ambitious novels in the French language. And it is grounded, entirely and specifically, in a small shell-shaped French tea cake dipped in a warm drink on a winter afternoon.

I think about this every time I make madeleines, partly because I find it genuinely beautiful and partly because it is the most accurate description I have encountered of what a warm madeleine actually does. They are not flashy. They are not the most technically impressive thing in the baking repertoire. But there is something about the specific combination of brown butter, lemon zest and the slight chewiness of the crumb — when they are made properly, eaten at the right moment — that is disproportionate to their simplicity. Proust was not wrong.

A madeleine is not a small cake that happens to be cooked in a shell-shaped mould. It is a very specific thing: a génoise-style batter enriched with browned butter, rested overnight in the fridge, then baked in a cold, well-buttered tin in a very hot oven. The result should have a crisp, golden exterior, a soft and slightly springy crumb inside, and — this is the definitive quality indicator — a distinctive dome, or hump, on its flat side. A flat madeleine is a madeleine that has been made without understanding why the technique matters.

The hump is the whole story of the method in visible form. When cold batter meets a cold tin and a very hot oven, the edges of the madeleine set almost immediately on contact with the hot metal while the centre, insulated by the batter around it, continues to rise. The rising centre has nowhere to go but upward, and it pushes through the setting surface to form the dome. No cold rest, no thermal shock, no hump. The rest is not a suggestion or a shortcut. It is the reason the thing is what it is.

A standard madeleine uses melted butter. A better madeleine uses beurre noisette: butter cooked past the melting point and into the stage where the milk solids, sinking to the base of the pan, turn deep amber and begin to smell of hazelnuts. The French call this stage noisette — hazelnut — for the colour and the scent, and what it adds to the batter is not simply butter flavour but a deeper, more complex thing: a warmth and a nuttiness that plain melted butter cannot produce and that makes itself felt in the finished madeleine as something just out of reach of description but not of appreciation.

The technique requires attention and a light-coloured pan. The colour change from golden to amber to burnt happens fast, and a dark pan makes it impossible to see until too late. Watch it from the moment the foaming subsides, swirling occasionally, and pull it off the heat and pour it through a sieve the moment it smells right. The sieve stops the cooking by removing the milk solids from the residual heat. The sieve is not optional.

The butter should cool to room temperature before it goes into the batter. Hot beurre noisette folded into whipped eggs scrambles them. Cool beurre noisette folds in smoothly and gives the batter its particular glossy quality.

Lemon zest is the classic flavouring for a French madeleine, and it earns its place not as decoration but as the clean, bright counterpoint to the nuttiness of the brown butter. The two are made for each other: fat and acid, warmth and brightness, the butter rounding the lemon and the lemon cutting through the butter. Two lemons’ worth of zest for this quantity of batter is the right amount — enough to taste clearly without dominating the brown butter’s contribution.

The honey is less classic but very much worth including. A tablespoon in the batter adds a floral depth and a moisture that keeps the madeleine from drying at the edges during its short, hot bake, and it means the finished cakes stay better for longer if you have any left — which, at a table with other people, you probably will not.

Making madeleines properly requires two distinct sessions, which is why they are, despite their small size, a considered thing to make rather than a quick one. The first session is ten minutes: brown the butter, beat the batter, fold everything together and put it in the fridge. The second session is twenty minutes the next morning or that evening: heat the oven, prep the tin, fill the moulds, bake, turn out, eat immediately.

The second session produces the madeleines. The first session produces the conditions for them. Understanding the recipe as two sessions rather than one makes it considerably more manageable and considerably more reliable, and it means that a plate of warm madeleines, apparently produced effortlessly and in under half an hour, has actually been in progress since the previous evening. The planning is the secret ingredient, and it is not one that needs to be mentioned to guests.

Serves 4. About 10 minutes’ preparation and 25 minutes of attentive cooking.

Ingredients

• 300g Carnaroli rice (or Arborio)
• A generous pinch of saffron threads, about 0.5g
• 1.2 litres good chicken or veal stock, kept warm in a separate pan throughout
• 1 white onion or 2 shallots, very finely diced
• 60g unsalted butter: 30g for the soffritto, 30g cold and cubed for the mantecatura
• A splash of dry white wine or dry vermouth
• 80g Parmigiano Reggiano, finely grated, plus more to serve
• Sea salt and white pepper

Makes 24. About 15 minutes’ active work, one overnight rest, then 10 minutes’ baking per batch of 12.

Ingredients

• 150g unsalted butter, plus extra softened butter for the tin
• 3 large eggs, at room temperature
• 150g caster sugar
• 1 tbsp runny honey
• 2 unwaxed lemons, zested
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 150g plain flour, plus extra for the tin
• 1½ tsp baking powder
• A pinch of fine sea salt
• Icing sugar, to dust (optional)

1. Brown the butter. Melt the butter in a small, light-coloured saucepan over medium heat. Continue cooking, swirling the pan occasionally, until the milk solids turn deep golden brown and the butter smells distinctly of hazelnuts, about 5 to 6 minutes. Watch it from the moment the foaming subsides. Pour immediately through a fine sieve into a bowl to stop the cooking and leave to cool to room temperature. It should be amber — not pale, not dark brown.
2. Beat the eggs and sugar to ribbon stage. Beat the eggs, sugar, honey, lemon zest and vanilla together with an electric whisk on medium-high speed for 3 to 4 minutes until the mixture is pale, thick and falls from the whisk in a slow, thick ribbon that holds its shape on the surface for a moment before sinking back. This ribbon stage is what gives the madeleine its structure.
3. Fold in the flour and brown butter. Sift the flour, baking powder and salt over the egg mixture and fold in gently with a large metal spoon until just combined. Then pour the cooled brown butter around the edge of the bowl in a slow, steady stream, folding gently as you go until the butter is fully incorporated and the batter is smooth and glossy. Do not beat.
4. Rest the batter — this is the whole secret. Cover the bowl tightly and refrigerate for a minimum of 2 hours. Overnight is considerably better. The batter will thicken and the butter will begin to firm. This rest is not optional. It is what makes the hump.
5. Prepare the tin. When ready to bake, heat the oven to 200°C (180°C fan). Brush the madeleine tin very generously with softened butter, making sure every ridge and shell-pattern detail is coated — madeleines stick enthusiastically to an under-greased tin. Dust with flour, tap out the excess, and place the tin in the freezer for 10 minutes. Cold tin, cold batter, very hot oven: this is the formula.
6. Fill the moulds. Remove the batter from the fridge. Using a spoon or a piping bag, fill each mould to about three-quarters full. Do not spread or flatten the batter — it will settle in the heat. Do not overfill.
7. Bake. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until the edges are deep golden brown, the hump has risen in the centre and the tops spring back when very gently pressed. A madeleine that has gone a minute too long is noticeably drier. Take them out on the earlier side rather than the later.
8. Turn out and eat. Remove from the oven and immediately turn the madeleines out onto a wire rack by tapping the tin sharply on the counter. The hump side is the flat side: flip them so the shell pattern faces up. Dust with icing sugar if you like. Eat within twenty minutes.

On the tin: a metal madeleine tin with a non-stick coating is the most reliable. Silicone moulds produce a softer outer surface and a less defined hump. If you do not yet own a madeleine tin, it is worth acquiring one: it has no other purpose and it is therefore, in kitchen equipment terms, a completely defensible object.

On the butter temperature: this point cannot be overstated. Hot beurre noisette added to a bowl of whipped eggs produces scrambled eggs with butter in them, which is not what this recipe is for. The butter should be cool to the touch before it goes anywhere near the batter. If you are impatient, a bowl of cold water beneath the brown butter bowl will cool it faster.

On the moulding: a tablespoon measure or an ice cream scoop produces consistent portions. A piping bag produces the neatest results. A regular dessert spoon produces entirely adequate results and requires no additional equipment.

On dipping: Proust was right. A warm madeleine dipped into a cup of lemon verbena tea, or lime-flower infusion, or very good English breakfast tea, is a different and more complete experience than the same madeleine eaten alongside a cup held separately. The original instructions were correct.

On the second batch: the tin needs to be rebutterd, refloured and returned to the freezer between batches. This takes four minutes. The second batch is worth it.

This is my own recipe, made many times and always eaten FAR too quickly. The Proustian interpretation is borrowed gratefully from the man who put it best. One shouldn’t water at the mouth at their own recipes, but here I am.