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The genuine madeleine de Commercy

A madeleine or petite madeleine is a traditional sweet from Commercy, a town of the Meuse département in northeastern France.

Madeleines are identified by the distinctive shell-like shape they acquire from being baked in special pans with shell-shaped depressions. Madeleines are cake-like and fairly small. Their flavor is similar to, but somewhat lighter than, pound cake, with a pronounced butter-and-lemon taste. The madeleine can be made in different flavors including vanilla, lemon, orange, and chocolate.

Madeleine pan.

Aside from the traditional molded pan, commonly found in stores specializing in kitchen equipment, few tools are required to make madeleines. The recipe includes common cake ingredients such as flour, eggs, butter and sugar.

Madeleines are perhaps most famous outside France for their association with involuntary memory in the Marcel Proust novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past in the first translation, more recently translated as In Search of Lost Time), in which the narrator experiences an awakening upon tasting a madeleine with tea:

"She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called petites madeleines, which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory…"   — Remembrance of Things Past, V. 1, Swann's Way. English translation, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922. Excerpt retrieved online from the Project Gutenberg e-Book of Volume 1.

• The name "madeleine" may be derived from Mary Magdalene, like "La Madeleine" and "maudlin."
• Madeleines were made in the 2002 action movie The Transporter by a character named Lai.
• In the 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction (film), the main character's love interest was a baker, who mentioned madeleines as a bakery item at her store.
• It was the sweet chosen to represent France in the Café Europe initiative of the Austrian presidency of the European Union, on Europe Day 2006.
• The anime series Serial Experiments Lain contains reference to the madeleines in its last episode. This was taken from Proust's novel.
• In the 2002 Korean movie, Madeleine, madeleines are mentioned.
• In episode 7 of the popular South Korean drama My Name is Kim Sam Soon, the female protagonist taught another character to dip madeleines in his tea before eating it. Aptly enough, the episode is titled "Madeleine, In Search of Lost Time."