Thattranslatorcancook 3: Lulu’s brown butter madeleines
Reading Time: 6 minutesThatTranslatorCanCook 3
Lulu’s brown butter madeleines with buckwheat and chocolate chips


When I like a cookbook, I like to make as many recipes as possible rather than jump from flower to flower like a butterfly. I'm the same visiting a new city or learning a language: I like to wander discovering little corners; I want to speak like a native, not get by. Variety is definitely the spice of life, but I like to feel like I master things. Getting to know that place, language or cuisine is like getting to know a good friend. But, having made over a third of the recipes in La Tartine Gourmande, I have started to get to know its younger sibling, My French Family Table (MFFT), and that’s where this recipe comes from. Both books offer gluten free, mainly vegetarian, recipes.
What’s in a name?
According to the Larousse Gastronomique, a madeleine is:
A small, individual, French sponge cake shaped like a rounded shell, made with sugar, flour, melted butter and eggs, flavoured with lemon or orange-flower water. The mixture is cooked in ribbed oval moulds which give the cakes their shell-like appearance.
Madeleines have busty cousins in Spain, but these tend to be round, not that sexy scalloped shape. Amongst the various versions regarding their origin; one goes that a certain duke visiting a castle was all smitten with a cake made by a peasant named Madeleine.
Today's big question is, if Spanish magdalenas descend from French madeleines, could we not just use the terms interchangeably? Could we go as far as calling cupcakes and muffins magdalenas too? After all, they are all similar things, aren't they? But the problem is they are not precisely identical twins. Should we borrow foreign terms as a rule of thumb to avoid misnomers? There is no short answer, but the expectations of the target audience and the author and publication’s style and marketing strategy will be deciding factors.
In fact, one of the problems with food terminology is that the same name can designate different products in different countries – cf. Epstein (2009) or Paradowski (2017, 2018). Such is the case of British and American chips and, as we'll see, an English madeleine, a French madeleine and a Spanish magdalena are somehow from different planets.
Then, like all terminology, it evolves. As well as new terms being invented for new creations (say duffin), existing terms change usage or connotations. That's how, amongst young Spaniards -due to the influence of films, TV series, travel, etc.- the term magdalenas evokes a different image and feelings to, say, American cupcakes (see Molina, 2012). I mean, who would equate a naked old magdalena with the modern tarted up cupcake hiding under icing and frills? Although, after a decade of trending, they appear to be falling out of favour: El Pais. (Yes, icing looks like death on a plate to me.) And why call a muffin magdalena when it's much bigger, crumblier, juicier and trendier? Give me a muffin any time.
So, here are today's big issues: marketing and equivalence. Can we ever equate two items that aren’t strictly the same? If the texture, shape, size and presentation are different, that’s a hell of a difference although the basic ingredients are similar. Which leads us to the fact that, in food translation, you will constantly have to fill cultural gaps. Indeed, the single biggest issue I grappled with throughout my culinary translation course was deciding how much to add without unduly expanding on the original text. I got there, but it’s a skill that takes practice, and a transferable one, IMO, to the fields of tourism and legal translation where cultural gaps and inequivalences abound.
But... have you ever eaten an English madeleine? I don't think I have, but then patisseries are few and far between where I live. An English madeleine is:
...a small, individual, English sponge cake which is baked in a dariole mould, coated with jam and desiccated coconut and topped with candied cherry and angelica. (Larousse Gastronomique)
Coconut, cherries, yum. Explore the links at the end to see how translating madeleine as madalena, or English madeleine as madeleine, for the matter, might leave readers or customers feeling rather cheated. But then it all depends on the aim of the paragraph or sentence you're writing and a recipe name is not the same as an explanation in a paragraph, is it?
Three Big Sisters: creative, technical... and food translation
The recipe name was already a good example of technical and marketing translation.
Do I want to make my food sound sexy and exciting or cosy and comforting? -to name a few options.
That is something a restaurant or pub owner will be asking themselves and I have a portfolio of translated texts in this field. So explore my website and get in touch if you need help.
Creative translation
Each cookbook writer has a personal style, and Peltre is rather good at storytelling:
“She likes to keep her nose pressed up against the oven in the hope of seeing their little bump form”.
That little bump will have already been named somewhere and the translator could use that existing term if it was being used technically. However, here it's all about storytelling and you need to make that bump sound magic. Therefore, the option I found in El Comidista (copete) just sounds the wrong tone. Descriptions in recipes are essential for marketing and for comprehension. The marketing type are sometimes overused and the technical type underused. (Keep an eye out for a future post on the language of cookbooks). They can be crucial to understanding texture or consistency and to selling the recipe, and they tend to be tricky to translate. Such an example is ‘oozing melted chocolate’, and no dictionary will provide an adequate translation, whilst we need a creative appetising solution, not the oozing wound type...

Technical translation
An interesting technical term in this recipe is brown butter and the corresponding verb to brown. Browning means various things in culinary terms. Browning vegetables, browning meat for roasting and browning butter have different purposes even if they all relate to colour, and thus they have different translations.
In this article, in Spanish, as well as descriptions of brown butter, you can find examples of something I discussed in my previous post: how perceptions vary cross-culturally. To some of us, brown butter smells like hazelnuts; to others, like nuts; and to Spanish people, mainly like walnuts -because that is probably the nut we eat most often.
The French term, beurre noisette, is a technical culinary term:
To make noisette butter, gently heat some butter in a frying pan until it is golden and gives off a nutty smell. (Larousse Gastronomique)
In my recipe:
“Cook over medium heat until slightly golden and with a nutty aroma”.
But the author cleverly uses the more colloquial brown butter given that the reader is not a chef’s apprentice but the home cook. As with other types of translation, register is something a food translator needs to master: translating for the general cook, for foodies and for a cookery course are different kettles of fish.
I am posh in my taste, but I see myself as a lifelong cook's apprentice and I was unsure how long the butter would take to brown. I am more of a savoury food person, who would have guessed. The author describes the colour and the smell and, judging by the glorious smell coming out of the oven, that's all that was needed.
Ingredients
Some ingredients, such as golden flax meal, pure vanilla extract and clover honey, might be tricky to source. Béatrice Peltre often gives substitution ideas. However, we cannot expect cookbook writers to predict everything that will be hard to find or unavailable in another country and the task of finding a solution will fall to the translator, if they want to help the book succeed. For example, I milled my own flax seeds, forgotten in the cupboard. Jumpy little seeds! I tried the old hand blender and the coffee grinder before setting for the mortar and pestle. After some elbow grease, flax seed 'meal' was made! Of course, an author who provides the tools is a dream. For example, Aran Goyoaga uses a lot of dukkah, but provides a recipe to make it. Brownie points for that!
In terms of vanilla extract, supermarkets tend to sell the cheap stuff rather than pure extract. Peltre offers two choices: pods or extract. Both are prohibitive, but then she's all about quality organic ingredients, which I would not take for granted. I recently found vanilla drops in a gourmet store and that's what I used. The package provided equivalences between drops and pods.
As for honey, I used one of those living at home, because "honeys, I have a few". There are various ways of dealing with this issue, but I'm not going to give you all the tricks of the trade!
What's in a magdalena?
I have described French madeleines, but what are the differences among magdalenas, muffins and cupcakes? I'll mention a few only.
In terms of texture, magdalenas are dry, spongy and need an airy batter to reach those peaks. Muffins, on the other hand, are crumbly, moist and compact. In the UK muffins often come injected with fruit jam or studded with chocolate chunks. Finally, they have a champignon shape because the batter is hardly worked and does not rise much. Lastly, elegant cupcakes are apparently made with sponge cake butter. And, of course, they're all about the decoration. Source: https://gastronomiaycia.republica.com/2009/08/14/magdalenas-muffins-y-cupcakes/
Cooking
The only issue is that the author does not provide fan oven temperatures. Although she does give Fahrenheit and Centigrade conversions. So, a cook in my good books! I started them at 200C instead of 215 just in case, but it seems I should have followed the instructions literally. At the end of the day, all her recipes have turned out so far. I had to put them back in and 5 minutes was just a little too long. The upside was that, being dryer, they kept much better.
ACADEMIC REFERENCES
Epstein, B. J. (2009). What’s cooking: Translating Food. Translation Journal, 13(3). Retrieved from http://translationjournal.net/journal/49cooking.htm
Molina, R. (2012, September 28). ¿Por qué lo llaman “cookie” cuando quieren decir galleta? El País. Retrieved from https://smoda.elpais.com/placeres/por-que-lo-llaman-cookie-cuando-quieren-decir-galleta/
Paradowski, M. B. (2018). What’s cooking in English culinary texts? Insights from genre corpora for cookbook and menu writers and translators. The Translator, 24(1), 50-69. https://doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2016.1271735
OTHER REFERENCES
• English madeleines: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/english-madeleines
• French madeleines gluten free recipe, though not the one I made: https://www.latartinegourmande.com/2007/02/12/an-urge-to-bake-madeleines-un-desir-effrene-de-faire-des-madeleines/
• Spanish magdalenas, pictures and recipe. Warning: you'll be drooling. https://elcomidista.elpais.com/elcomidista/2016/04/14/receta/1460639256_878979.html
• Variole mould: https://www.bakingfrenzy.com/dariole-mould-set-6-pcs-for-english-madeleine-p-119.html
NEXT TIME....
I might discuss the language of cookbooks
