We can thank French author Marcel Proust for putting madeleines on the culinary map. Proust featured the small French cakes in a passage in his early 20th century work, Remembrance of Things Past. Today, we can thank San Francisco Pastry Chef Gayle Gonzales for an utterly delicious version of Proust’s legendary cake: a chocolate madeleine made from extra virgin olive oil.
Gonzales recently featured her madeleine recipe on her exceptional blog, pastry studio. She graciously allowed us to reprint it on our Web site. We made the small cakes, shaped like a rounded shell, and found the recipe was easy to follow. The results were outstanding. (You’ll need a madeleine pan, widely available for purchase on the Internet.)
Ordinarily, madeleines are made using butter. Gonzales substituted EVOO for the butter and added good quality cocoa powder for the chocolate flavor.
“The marriage of dark chocolate, extra virgin olive oil and salt is a miraculous one,” Gonzales writes in a blog post about her madeleine. “Somehow these three ingredients have managed a rendezvous that can only be described as a thing of unique beauty.”
Gonzales used our Arbosana EVOO for her recipe. “It’s refined yet assertive enough to complement the cocoa,” she writes. “The results are really delicious.”
Proust seemed to agree about the magical quality of a good madeleine. In Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator vividly recalls his childhood after biting into one of the small cakes.
The madeleine’s origin isn’t clear-cut. One story links the cake to the chef for the influential 19th-century French diplomat, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord – or Talleyrand. But others believe the recipe is much older and originated in the town of Commercy, in northeastern France.
Regardless, let’s thank the original creator, as well as Proust – and now Gayle Gonzales – for bringing this delicious dish to our plates.
Bon appétit,
Claude S. Weiller
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
California Olive Ranch
