Remembrance of Things Past: Proust’s Madeleine

2007 film Ratatouille is an affectionate celebration of French culture and gastronomy made by US animation giant Pixar — a fact that seems all the more incongruous at a time when America seems to be increasingly inward-looking.

Towards the end of the film, the creators make a clear, albeit non-explicit, visual reference to a “madeleine moment” — what the French call the “Madeleine de Proust.” Food critic Anton Ego’s first bite of Rémy’s dish triggers an involuntary memory, and Ego is plunged into an emotional flashback of his mother and childhood in Provence.

The reference comes from Marcel Proust’s novel Swann’s Way, the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, in which the author, in typical lyrical style, describes how the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea similarly bought back his own sweet memories:

“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. [...] Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray [...] my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.”

I am reminded of this feeling every December when I taste my first tangerine of the year. As soon as I peel back the skin and that distinctive, bitter citrus burst hits my nostrils, vivid memories come flooding back; I can see myself opening my Christmas stocking, which my parents would cleverly pack with tangerines to buy them a few more minutes in bed on 25 December every year.

Interestingly, Proust's character also indicates that “the sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it.” This astute observation, unsurprisingly, has a biological explanation: studies show that olfactory signals travel directly from the olfactory nerves to the brain regions involved in emotion and memory — namely the amygdala and hippocampus — whereas optical signals are filtered by other regions like the thalamus. This direct routing helps explain why smells and tastes often trigger such emotional memories.

Whatever the explanation, this is a real psychological phenomenon, a human universal, and a feeling that deserves an expression in English vernacular. There is another term to describe this sensation — "precious fragments" — a lovely turn of phrase coined by American psychologist Marigold Linton, but this is not widely used either, so why not adopt the “madeleine moment” and simultaneously pay homage to Marcel Proust and French patisserie?

What food triggers a “madeleine moment” in you?