As mentioned above, madeleines were typically served with tea. Whereas tea was a beverage only available to the French nobility after its first introduction in the seventeenth-century, tt was during the second half of the nineteenth century when its consumption really started to take off as a result of the increased import of tea from Asia to Europe, along with other Asian products such as silk and porcelain. H. Saberi, Tea: a global history (London: Reaktion, 2010), 94 and 96. By the late 1870s, Parisian shops displayed a great abundance of Far Eastern items for sale such as fans, screens, ceramics, masks, and tea from China, Japan, and India.E. Emery, Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France, 1853-1914, (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020), 49.
A true idealization of the still-mysterious Far East and the Orient emerged. Due to the arrival of a packet of Japanese prints in Paris around 1860 and the subsequent organization of large exhibitions on Japanese art, an instant wave of amazement for Japanese culture arose, which often went along with a mania for all sorts of Japanese art objects and curios.J. Hokenson, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000, (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 13 and 186. See also: P. Genova, “A Curious Facet of Modern French Writing: Situating Japonisme Between East and West,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 13, no. 4 (2009): 455. This “Japonisme” soon entered the public domain and was adopted into a variety of realms such as fashion, interior design, and even gastronomy. In this context, tea-drinking became associated with Japanese tea ceremonies, the Far East, and with exoticism in general.
The appreciation of Japanese art also resonated within French artistic circles, as many French painters started to adopt Japanese painting techniques, styles, motifs, and compositional approaches in their paintings.Genova, ‘’A Curious Facet,”: 453. Inspired by the interest of painters in Japanese aesthetics, writers too began to explore the cultural forms of Japan; amongst one of the most renowned, was Marcel Proust.Genova, ‘’A Curious Facet,”: 453.