Definition of "madeleine" []

• A small rich cake, baked in a shell-shaped mold. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The first is a crossing of a French table grape called madeleine angevin with the much frowned-upon muller-thurgau."
• "Shortly after the book begins the narrator describes a moment on a wintry day when, chilled to the bone, his mother brings him a cup of tea with a little cake called a madeleine on the side."
• "The cricket writer Mike Marqusee once said that cricket sometimes acts on him the way the tea-cake called a madeleine acted on Marcel Proust, triggering a hidden chain of association, an entryway to what the French novelist called 'a vast structure of recollection '."