Truly a Cakewalk at Bay Area Firm

Like many people, I offer unconscious homage to Proust every time I try to read him, which is to say that I doze off. But I did get far enough--three times, in fact--to know that eating a funny little cake with tea unleashed a flood of memories in the narrator of Swann’s Way.

The cake--almost a cookie, really--was a madeleine, and eating one just now triggered some pretty strong memories in me too--memories of a recent Tuesday redolent of butter, a Tuesday spent deep in conversation as the sun shined upon this Bay Area village. . . .

But enough Proustian speechifying, lest we inspire further nodding homage. The point is that the weirdly hygienic industrial precincts of Emeryville harbor a little outfit called Donsuemor, which cranks out 1.5 million madeleines a year, baking just once a week. Named for its owners, Don and Susan Morris, it is America’s leading producer of these lethal little scallop-edged delights, whose ingredients would make a cardiologist blanch.

This being California, Donsuemor’s guiding spirit figures that the solution to that problem might be consciousness-raising.

“I’m considering a warning label: ‘These madeleines could be dangerous to your health,’ ” says Don Morris, dashing about to keep his mostly homemade equipment running. “But we’d probably just sell more if I did that, and I’m not interested in sales.”

Indeed not. Morris doesn’t drink tea and never mentions Proust, even though he could profit--maybe because he could profit--by doing so.

Profit around Donsuemor seems almost beside the point. There is no profit-and-loss statement, no marketing strategy, no 800 number, no advertising and no interest in growth. If you want Donsuemor madeleines, that’s your problem.

Donsuemor manages to sell a lot of madeleines nevertheless, to customers that include Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus, the Double Rainbow ice cream chain and shops and restaurants coast to coast.

One reason is that these madeleines, made only with sugar, butter, flour, eggs and some top-secret natural flavoring--my guess is vanilla--are heavenly.

Another is that Don Morris is more interested in making the perfect madeleine as efficiently as possible than in making money.

“It’s almost an aesthetic thing,” he says, outlining plans for rearranging the bakery and getting by with less space.

Madeleines that deviate even minutely from the scallop-shaped ideal are rejected, and Don spends hours tinkering with the equipment to improve performance.

To assist in loading madeleines into gold-striped cellophane bags, for example, he built a carousel from a 78 rpm turntable, a wastebasket, a hard disk from a mainframe computer, a shampoo bottle and other hand-me-downs. Empty bags revolving on it are blown open with air pumped through a vent hose intended for a clothes dryer.

This is the time of year when activity at Donsuemor reaches a fever pitch. On baking day, almost always a Tuesday, the buttery fragrance alone could inspire arteriosclerosis in a moose.

The atmosphere is kind of Berkeley-goes-to-business. Don works in house slippers. Susan Morris, a professional soprano who specializes in early music, used to lead the troops in madrigals before she got busy with Oliver, now 2 years old.

Don Morris, who has led the kind of life people elsewhere might consider quintessentially Californian, came to madeleines by accident via the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, Berkeley, the Esalen Institute, much travel, a variety of odd jobs and marriage.

It seems that a neighbor was making madeleines in her kitchen for a shop in Berkeley. When she got tired of it, Susan took over, the Morrises having tasted capitalism previously by selling hand-painted skirts to I. Magnin.

That was around 1976. In those days, Susan was making the madeleines one at a time, with a spoon, and they were selling out. The rest is more or less history. With a wholesale price of about 20 cents per madeleine, the business now grosses perhaps $300,000 a year.

The Morrises have managed to avoid the pitfalls that have claimed many bigger California enterprises in recent years.

They outlasted bigger savings and loan institutions, for example, by avoiding risk and not diversifying. Donsuemor only makes madeleines, and only one kind. They make no chocolate madeleines, lite madeleines or madeleines with duck fennel sausage and sauteed radicchio.

Unlike many big retailers, leverage is no problem. Donsuemor has never had a loan.

Most of the equipment was bought secondhand, and Don laments being so busy lately that he can no longer ransack junkyards. The flagship of the Morrises’ delivery fleet is a 1968 Volkswagen bus with one of those black California license plates bearing just six characters. In his Esalen days, Don used it to ferry around Alan Watt, Rollo May and other luminaries.

“I’ve never taken money seriously, one way or the other,” he says. “But I’m not afraid of it.”

One thing not in the plans is Marcel Proust (whom Don hasn’t read except for the madeleine part). His name and likeness may be in the public domain, but the Morrises are unmoved. They’re selling madeleines, not literature, and as Don explains, “I don’t want people to buy them for other than what they are.”