David Lebovitz

Although there is much to be done in the coming days, I am taking a hygge day—choral Christmas music, ginger spice candle, fuzzy clothes, baking,and tea…

I realize that community is central to the Danish practice of hygge—coziness, togetherness, sharing, and reciprocity… board games, comfort food, and mulled wine…

Seeing that my near future holds an abundance of family time, I am content to build a solo hygge experience right now. Let’s hope that this cozy “me time” helps me to refrain from snapping at my family next week. (Who are we kidding? I will be short with them!)

Later today, I will prepare a savory pork roast. I will roast vegetables. I will sip lush red wine. I will listen to podcasts, and I will write in my journal. Maybe I will Netflix and chill.

But for now, I am indulging in freshly baked cookies: David Lebovitz’s Buckwheat Chocolate Chip Cookies. They’re earthy, sweet and robust. I pair them with an appropriately cold-weather tea—Nilgiri Frost Oolong. This rare tea—from India—develops its intense fruitiness during chilly winter months. Its assertiveness stands up to the chocolate, buckwheat and walnut. This cookie-tea pair is quintessential winter fare.

My solitary hygge day is not lonely—I deliver Buckwheat Chocolate Chip Cookies to a baker friend, I chat with my stylist about her holiday plans, and I text a sleepy friend in Europe. My hygge mindset weaves a web of meaningful togetherness that will gently carry me into the chaos of the coming weeks.

Inspirations

The New York Times on Hygge

The New Yorker on Hygge

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“…I brought to my lips a spoonful of tea in which I had softened a piece of madeleine. But at the exact moment when the mouthful mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I shivered, attentive to this extraordinary thing that was taking place in me. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated, no notion of its cause. It had instantly made me indifferent to the vicissitudes of life, made its disasters harmless, its brevity illusory, in the same way that love operates, filling me with a precious essence: or more accurately this essence wasn’t in me, it was me.” –Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

Shell-shaped madeleine cakes were a part of my life before I ever knew about Marcel Proust and the memory-inducing power of his petites madeleines. When I was a student in Paris, a bakery close to my school sold five madeleines for five francs—a deal! At lunchtime, I’d often make my way down the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to pick up one of the tidy white bags holding five portable cakes. Sometimes they were still warm. Madeleines were my ideal student snack—simple, toothsome, and shareable. A chocolate éclair or strawberry tartelette would have been more impressive, but the dainty butter cakes comforted me. I imprinted my own madeleine experience well before encountering Proust.

Later, I would discover that Proust, too, found comfort in madeleines. In the first volume of his 3,000 page novel Remembrance of Things Past, tasting a madeleine dipped in tea unleashes the narrator’s memory of taking tea and cake with Aunt Léonie. In French culture, a madeleine de Proust refers to a heart-warming, evocative culinary experience that joins past and present. Madeleine cakes are one of my madeleines de Proust. They bring me back to the sweet, exhilarating sadness of being so far from home. Other sweets unleash my involuntary memory, allowing me a delicious, temporary dance between past and present: Grandma Rose Mary’s orange cookies, Grandma Mary Ellen’s sticky rolls, and the frosted graham crackers Mom served me as a toddler. The frosting was always homemade, and she always served them on a rectangular, strawberry-patterned tray that is still in her kitchen.

What foods bring your past into the present? Tell me about your madeleines de Proust in the comment section.

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Hygge for One

My Madeleines de Proust