Professor Butter Beard and Berenice Abbott
My grandfather introduced me to photography. I have such vivid memories of Saturdays at the Portage Lake house starting with a bowl of Cheerios and peanut butter toast (the only breakfast my grandfather could make) and then heading down the stairs to his workshop and darkroom kingdom. We would spend hours together, heads swimming with the smell of the processing chemicals and the glow of the red light bulb. I truly believed in magic as I watched the visions I had captured during my grade school field trip to the Cleveland Zoo emerge as frozen black and white dreamscapes on the shiny wet paper. He was, and will always be, my Merlin.
My passion for black and white photography thrives to this day. Timothy O’Sullivan, Eugène Atget and Dorothea Lange are three of my favorite masters, but it is Berenice Abbott who speaks directly to my artistic soul. Both of us were raised in the cornfields of Ohio with a craving to experience the world. After only a few semesters at Ohio State University, she fled to Paris in early 1918 and was hired by Man Ray as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. She later wrote: “I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else.”
In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget who was noted for his determination to document all of the architecture and street scenes of Paris before their disappearance to modernization. Berenice developed an obsession with his photographs and after his early death, she acquired all the prints and negatives remaining in his studio and moved to New York with the goal of finding an American publisher for his works. She began to see New York just as Atget has seen Paris and soon embarked on a mission to document the city as it underwent a transformation into a modern metropolis. She described her own work as an exploration of the “fantastic contrast between the old and the new,” and chose her camera angles and lenses to specifically create layered compositions of lines and spaces.
In her own words: “Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.” As I “painted” the white chocolate lines over the dark surfaces of these chocolate madeleines, I imagined Berenice chatting with my grandfather as he processed her photographs under the glow of a red light bulb.
Dark Chocolate Madeleines
30-32 Madeleines – using two Madeleine baking trays - see process images below
Ingredients:
13 Tbsp unsalted butter – plus 3 Tbsp more to prep the madeleine trays
4 tsp honey
4 large eggs
½ cup granulated sugar
½ tsp vanilla paste
1 tsp instant espresso powder
1 cup all-purpose flour – plus more to dust the madeleine trays
3 Tbsp dark cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp chili powder
½ tsp kosher salt
1 cup dark chocolate morsels
½ cup white chocolate morsels
1) Place the 13 Tbsp of butter and 4 tsp of honey in a small saucepan over low heat until the butter has melted. Stir to combine, remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.
2) Sift together the flour, dark cocoa powder, baking powder, cinnamon, chili powder and salt.
3) Place the eggs, sugar, vanilla and espresso powder in a food processor and process until smooth and combined. Add the flour mixture and pulse a few times to combine. Pour in the cooled butter/honey and pulse again to combine. Pour the batter into a bowl, cover with plastic wrap and let rest in the refrigerator for one hour.
4) Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Melt the remaining 3 Tbsp of butter and use to brush the madeleines trays. Then dust the trays with all-purpose flour (like prepping a cake pan).
5) Portion the batter into the individual madeleine wells - 2/3 full. Bake one tray at a time for roughly 10 minutes until the “humps” are just solid. Remove from the oven and let sit 3 minutes before turning the cakes out onto a cooling rack.
6) Once cooled, the madeleines can be dipped in the dark chocolate and decorated with the white. I melt my chocolates in the microwave. Microwave on high in 20 second increments, until the chocolate is melted and smooth, stirring after each “zap.” I also use a homemade parchment paper pastry bag to draw with the white chocolate. Or, pour the melted white chocolate into a small plastic bag and snip off a corner tip with scissors.
