I'll expand on this since I found it interesting. Essentially it's a reference to a French epic called "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust. It was his life's work and is around 4.2k pages or 1.3 million words! That's much larger than "War and Peace", "Les Miserables", "Crime and Punishment", "The Iliad", and "The Odyssey" combined; which is super impressive.

It is also impressive how Monthy Python managed to compress it to 30 seconds :-)

I actually haven't seen Monty Python's parody of it! Will be sure to give it a watch after reading it

I have never had a Madeleine cookie, they are not common around here. Are they worthwhile to bake yourself? Since they are so famous because of this reference, I think I should find one to taste.

They use a lot of butter and they go well with coffee. Yes. (Both Wikipedia [1] and the Joy of Cooking consider them cakes rather than cookies.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_(cake)

[2] Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker. Joy of Cooking (rev. ed.). Scribner. 1997. pp 962-963.

Interesting, for some reason I translated the Croatian word "kolačić" for "small cake" to cookie. I guess cookie is not a small cake. In Croatian the expression is "madeleine kolačić".

Thanks for this. My father was reading Swann’s Way when he passed away. I wonder what his Proustian madeleine was?