A friend came to tea with her daughters, bringing a bowlful of cake-mix which was swiftly turned into madeleines.
In the first book, Swann’s Way, of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (as it’s now usually called in English), the narrator goes home to visit his mother, who:
“… seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take… She sent for one of those squat, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines’, which look as though they have been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing tomorrow, 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 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. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…”
Marcel explores within himself this new sensation:
“Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind… And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray… when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give to me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.”
Thus, the source of what is now known as “sense memory”.
(By the way, it’s really useful as an excursion technique in brainstorming.)
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