Proust, Seventeen Mall

In Parisian novelist Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, one bite of a tea-soaked madeleine unlocked a lifetime of memories, returning the narrator to the lost Sundays of his childhood.

PJ’s forthcoming bakery Proust will serve its own European-inspired reveries in Seventeen Mall starting later this month, a collaboration between Pohutukawa Coffee and Kuro Coffee.

Rich-crumbed madeleines unfold in flavours of lemon, brown butter or black tea; fragrant financiers in raspberry or gula Melaka; focaccia in honey, fig and feta or kulim oil with mushrooms, paired with house-made jams of strawberry with balsamic vinegar or lemon ginger apple.

“Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours.

“When from a long-distant past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment.” Proust, circa 1913–1927