![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/img-9056-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Over the course of Villa Albertine\u2019s Proust Weekend, a series of talks, workshops, and readings celebrating the forthcoming English translation of the last volume of the Recherche<\/i> and the centenary of Proust\u2019s death, I ate more cakes per diem than usual: on Sunday afternoon, a miniature pistachio financier, a Lego-shaped and moss-textured cake that reminded me of the enormous chartreuse muffins at my college cafeteria; on Saturday morning, a crisp, disc-like, almond-sliver-sprinkled shortbread cookie with a hole, which reminded me of a Chinese coin; and, on Friday night, at a holiday party, a dish of Reddi-wip and sour cream studded with canned mandarin slices and maraschino cherries apparently called \u201cambrosia salad.\u201d It reminded me of the music video for Katy Perry\u2019s \u201cCalifornia Gurls.\u201d But these were really only preliminary research exercises for the episode in which Proust Weekend was to culminate: a \u201cProust-inspired madeleine event with surprise guests\u201d!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I attended some panels. When Lydia Davis was beamed in to talk about her award-winning translation of Swann\u2019s Way<\/i>, I stared at the cat in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.\u00a0In order to be properly Proustian, I knew, the center of an experience would be hidden in the margins of the event itself.\u00a0The events of the Weekend transpired in the second-floor ballroom of the Gilded Age mansion that houses Villa Albertine, the French embassy\u2013adjacent artist\u2019s residency program that had organized the event. Most attendees were, I gathered, elderly residents of the Upper East Side and\/or miscellaneous French people. The Payne Whitney Mansion seemed like a memory palace<\/a> designed expressly for the contents of the Recherche<\/i>: ceilings bordered by Rococo botanical motifs as rhizomatic as Proust\u2019s syntax; or a purple-carpeted grand staircase bookended by two urns of exotic flora that reminded me of Combray\u2019s psychedelically hued asparagus (\u201csteeped in ultramarine and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet\u201d).<\/p>\n On Sunday at four, Proust Weekenders would be getting an exclusive \u201cfirst taste\u201d of a special collaboration between Villa Albertine and the Ladur\u00e9e pastry franchise: a madeleine-flavored macaron. I\u2019m not sure why macarons were chosen instead of madeleines\u2014perhaps because \u201cmacarons,\u201d according to the president of Ladur\u00e9e US, Elisabeth Holder, \u201care the supermodels of the food industry.\u201d As I took my seat in the ballroom, I recalled all the Ladur\u00e9e products I had consumed in the past year: most recently, rose petals suspended in a luminous pink jelly, on my birthday, which is also the date of Proust\u2019s death; a turquoise macaron that I selected from a box of six others because I knew it was called the \u201cMarie Antoinette\u201d; half of the \u201cChamps-\u00c9lys\u00e9es Breakfast\u201d served at Ladur\u00e9e Soho (disgusting); approximately ten or twelve macarons of various colors, at an event for which I signed an NDA on an iPad at the door; and, last winter, an orange-colored macaron with a tiger printed on it. This last macaron, a Lunar New Year limited edition of some Asian flavor (mango? passion fruit?), gave me pause. Whenever I go into a Ladur\u00e9e, the store is filled with Asian girls making their Asian boyfriends take pictures of them with their macarons\u2014just like me. The franchise called Paris Baguette is actually Korean. The most recognizably Japanese fashions are strange perversions of those once worn at Versailles. Why do Asian girls love French things\/sweets so much? I wondered, not for the first time.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the madeleine event had begun. And the Villa Albertine had a surprise for us: there would be not one but three <\/i>madeleine reinterpretations to be tasted tonight! We clapped and cheered. We were hungry. The interpretations sat on a small table at the front of the ballroom, arrayed in order of height. Behind them sat three French pastry chefs.<\/p>\n Pastries are the perfect food for interpretation. Their distinct exterior shapes and conventionally determined flavors provide a set of coded forms ready-made for culinary rereadings: like the deconstructionist Dominique Ansel<\/a>\u2019s \u201ccookie shot,\u201d milk poured into a vessel made out of cookie. I think people love variations on a classic because they like to perceive forms and contents being playfully recombined on the normally nonliterate medium of their tongue, remixing their memories to psychedelic effect. (In East Asia, novelty reinterpretations of Western sweet foods, like wasabi-flavored Oreos, are peculiarly popular.) Fancier pastries are often adorned with quirky semiotic flourishes, in which ingredients inside <\/i>the pastry are present in quasi-symbolic form outside <\/i>of it, like candied tea leaves topping a tea-flavored tea cake. The madeleine, though, is a humble cookie made from brioche dough and shaped like a shell. It is basically birthday cake\u2013flavored, which, when it comes to cakes, is like having no flavor at all. So I was skeptical of Ladur\u00e9e\u2019s madeleine-flavored macaron: was the soft madeleine, like the crisp macaron, not defined primarily by its texture? Was a madeleine-flavored macaron not oxymoronic, like a lemon-flavored orange? (It would have been more Proustian and Modernist, I thought, to make a madeleine in the shape of a paving stone, using, somehow, molecular gastronomy.)<\/p>\n Before we could taste these treats, another panel. The interpretations were explained to us. Chef Sebastien Rouxel, from the team at Daniel Boulud<\/a>, had added Grand Marnier to the basic madeleine recipe and made a large loaf version of the cake. Chef Eunji Lee, who recently opened her own patisserie, Lys\u00e9e<\/a>, created a medium-size madeleine with a soft caramel center and a toasted brown rice glaze, in honor of her French Korean identity. And Chef Jimmy Leclerc, from Ladur\u00e9e\u2014the tallest of the three but the creator of the smallest pastry\u2014was there to represent the madeleine-flavored macaron<\/a>. The three chefs told us memories from their childhoods. Then they told us even more stories from their lives, which included transcontinental immigrations, detours into military service, and patisserie apprenticeships much more difficult than either of these. Questions were asked; jokes were made. At last, we were released into the Marble Room, where, meanwhile, three silver platters bearing Leclerc\u2019s and Lee\u2019s inventions, plus three silver urns dispensing hot drinks, had appeared on the Villa\u2019s ivory tablecloths. (Rouxel\u2019s loaf we would receive to go, as a party favor to share with loved ones.) I gathered my treats on a Ladur\u00e9e logo\u2019d napkin.<\/p>\n I took a photo. Then, I put them in my mouth, one by one. The \u201chot\u201d chocolate, though promisingly thick and sweet, was actually cold, like NyQuil. The unlabeled herbal tea tasted what I can only describe as \u201cherbal.\u201d Lee\u2019s madeleine tasted like \u201cyellow cake.\u201d Ladur\u00e9e\u2019s madeleine-flavored macaron tasted more like a macaron than any macaron I\u2019d ever had: crunchy and then soft, its center like butter mixed with sugar. Though I enjoyed each of these moments of the madeleine event, I did not have an experience of form, content, Proust, life, or literature\u2014or really of anything, aside from pure sugar. Had I, in my research, eaten so many sweets in the past forty-eight hours that I was anesthetized to their reverie-inducing qualities?<\/p>\n I was about to get back in the now-dwindling pastry line for a second try when I was invited on a private tour of the mansion, which would end on the roof. Feeling vaguely sedated, as though the cocoa really had been NyQuil, I followed the dapper director of the Villa Albertine, plus the three chefs, up a long flight of stairs painted in a rainbow gradient of Ladur\u00e9e macaron colors\u2014Pistache, Citron, Rose, Cassis<\/em>\u2014<\/i>until we emerged into the twilight above Fifth Avenue. The Midtown skyscrapers were all lit up for Christmas. Below us, the park was dark. The air was cold and bright. The sky was a color somewhere between Marie Antoinette and Cassis: it was beautiful. I gasped. So did the three chefs. The director took a TikTok (I think).<\/p>\n The wind whipped around me, I clambered over some kind of ventilation pipe, and I remembered, all of a sudden, Olivier Assayas\u2019s Irma Vep<\/i>, in which Maggie Cheung, on Ambien and wearing a black latex catsuit, runs around at night on the roof of her Paris hotel. Cheung basically plays herself: a Hong Kong kung fu\u2013flick actress who has been cast as the lead in a reinterpretation of a classic French film. It is the best acting I\u2019ve ever seen: Cheung, who barely talks, manages to be both perfectly Oriental and something else behind that Oriental person that no one, on the screen or watching it, can really see. I remembered how, watching it, at sixteen, an age when I was \u201cobsessed with Godard,\u201d was the first time I really felt Chinese. And, as I shivered, because I was in fact attired in only a thin, cheetah-print catsuit, many of the details that had so randomly struck me over the course of that weekend, like Lydia Davis\u2019s cat and Ladur\u00e9e\u2019s tiger flavor, reemerged and rearranged themselves, like the chemical transformations produced by cooking. I did not remember, until that moment, that when I, like Proust\u2019s hero, have to go to bed earlier than my insomnia allows, I will smoke weed and listen to one of the five thirty-minute-long poetry readings by the Chinese American poet Tan Lin that I have downloaded to my phone. My favorite track is a poem in Seven Controlled Vocabularies <\/i>in which Lin eats at a molecular gastronomy restaurant whose chef \u201cis young and looks like a cowboy reincarnated as a skateboarder.\u201d Why do Asian girls love French things\/sweets so much? I do not know, but, until then, there on the roof, I had forgotten that I started this nightly listening practice when I was seeing someone trained as a French pastry chef who would sometimes, being a baker, leave my apartment before sunrise to work, waking me, and I realized that my taste for experimental poetry and therefore, indirectly, for Proust, was inextricably tied to desiring someone whose ambition was to make a psychoactive weed croissant, which is such a good idea. Language acts on you in surprising ways when you only hear it half-asleep. I realized that I had, over many nights, perfectly reproduced all of Seven Controlled Vocabularies <\/i>somewhere in my memory. Cats feature in the book, <\/i>as does being Chinese. I was grateful to Chef Eunji Lee, whose yellow-flavored psychoactive madeleine must have made me more Asian than I had previously realized. \u201cThe ideas of food erase the food itself and then become the food you did not think you were eating,\u201d Lin said on the roof, in my head. \u201cOff to one side of the fruit was smeared what looked like hot fudge sauce except that it was made of ketchup and jalapeno peppers. The sauce was semi-frozen. The sauce was hot and cold and cold and hot I couldn\u2019t tell which. I put the pineapple in my mouth and it was like eating something that was once a vegetable.\u201d I thought of wasabi-flavored Oreos, and M. Swann\u2019s lover\u2019s house full of Oriental flowers, which she loves for their \u201csupreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin.\u201d And as the sky above Central Park darkened, finally, to an inky color unknown to the kitchens at Ladur\u00e9e, I had found the thought I had nearly forgotten, which is that I am really most Asian when I am asleep, or eating a macaron.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Olivia Kan-Sperling is an assistant editor at <\/i>The Paris Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe interpretations sat on a small table, arrayed in order of height. Behind them sat three French pastry chefs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2182,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68551],"tags":[67827,578,575,11725,68573],"class_list":["post-162734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dispatch","tag-featured","tag-in-search-of-lost-time","tag-marcel-proust","tag-pastry","tag-villa-albertine"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n