Remembering snack cakes past.
Dear Dr. Boli: My French teacher keeps going on about Proust till I just want to strangle her. But one of the things she keeps talking about is madeleines, which seem to be some kind of thing French people eat while they’re sitting around being French, and I started to wonder what they are. I could go to a French bakery and find out, but they might start speaking French, and if I have to hear another word of French after listening to Mrs. Costello butcher the language in third period it will just about kill me. So I thought I’d ask you: What are madeleines? —Sincerely, Olivia, Bored Out of Her Mind in Mrs. Costello’s Third-Period French Class.
Dear Miss: Madeleines are Hostess Twinkies stamped in a cockleshell mold, and with the filling removed. French people find them very evocative. They bring back old memories of things past, in the same way that, for Americans, unaltered Hostess Twinkies bring back memories of metal lunchboxes and food fights in the elementary-school cafeteria.