Madeleine

Another essential part of the Tea 5 experience is to try our signature housemade Madeleine cake with its distinctive shell-like shape and zesty top recommended to be taken with our Dancing Snowflakes art tea from Harney & Sons or our signature Builder’s tea from Payton & Byrne.

Madeleines are most famous outside France for their association with involuntary memory in the Marcel Proust novel A la recherché du temps perdu, Remembrance of Things Past in which the author experiences a cause to remember memories upon tasting a Madeleine with lime flower tea:

‘She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called Madeleine’s 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 palette 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, Volume 1: Swanns Way