Madeleine cookies are commercially produced primarily in the town of Commercy in eastern France, where several conflicting stories exist about their namesake and who invented them. As you would expect from a sweet treat, madeleines are not a rich source of nutrition, but they do provide a small amount of most vitamins, minerals and protein.
Background
Madeleine cookies originated in France and were described as an "exquisite pleasure" in Marcel Proust's book "Remembrance of Things Past." Tradition calls for dipping them in tea, preferably one that imparts a lemon essence. Current recipes often flavor them with lemon zest, but they can also be prepared with orange zest, chocolate or nuts. The cookies---or tea cakes---are baked in a scallop-shaped mold called a madeleine pan.
Recipe
The recipe used to calculate nutritional value includes: 3 large eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tsp. baking powder, 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, 1 tsp. lemon zest, 8 tblsp. butter and 1 cup milk. This recipe makes 24 madeleine cookies, but the nutritional values that follow are for just one cookie that weighs about 1 ounce.
Basic Nutrition
One cookie contains 95 calories, 6 grams (g) of sugar, and no dietary fiber. It provides 12 g, or 4 percent of the recommended daily value (DV), of carbohydrates. The total amount of fat is 4 g, which represents 7 percent of the daily value. Most of the fat is unhealthy, providing 13 percent DV of saturated fat and 12 percent DV of cholesterol. Some recipes call for the more traditional whipped egg whites rather than whole eggs. If you used egg whites, the total fat would only go down to 6 percent DV, but cholesterol would drop dramatically to 3 percent DV. Each cookie supplies a small amount of the heart healthy fats: 21 mg of omega-3 and 225 mg of omega-6 fatty acids.
One madeleine cookie provides 3 percent of the daily value of protein. At NutritionData.com, protein is rated to reflect whether all the necessary amino acids are present in the correct proportions. Madeleines have a score of 98, where 100 or higher indicates a complete protein.
Vitamins
The cookies have a small amount of all the vitamins except C and K. One cookie supplies 1 percent DV of vitamins D, E and B6. It also has 2 percent of the daily value of vitamin B12 and niacin. You'll receive 3 percent DV of vitamin A and 4 percent DV of folate, riboflavin and thiamin. If you made the switch from whole eggs to egg whites, you would lose vitamins B6 and B12.
Minerals
Madeleines provide 1 percent of the daily value of magnesium, potassium, zinc and copper. They have calcium (2 percent DV); sodium (2 percent DV); iron (3 percent DV); manganese (3 percent DV); phosphorus (4 percent DV). One cookie is also a good source of selenium (7 percent DV).
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