On Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:07:17 +0100, Kate Dicey
> wrote:

>RWO wrote:
>
>> The Bay of Abu Qir, Egypt, between the Rosetta mouth of the Nile and
>> Alexandria, is where the English defeated a French fleet in August
>> 1798.
>>
>> There is a cake (bombe) which has chestnut cream in it, named Aboukir,
>> and there is a petit-four made with almond paste and whole almonds,
>> also named Aboukir.
>>
>> Any solid proof of a connection between the name of the place and the
>> name of the two desserts. My Larousse Gastronomique mentions Aboukir
>> Almonds but gives no background on the name; Alan Davidson is silent
>> on the topic (in The Penguin Companion to Food). No mention that I can
>> see in "A Culinary History of Food" (Flandrin et Montanari).
>
>Try geography as well as history: while California is currently the
>world's largest almond producer, Egypt has been an exporter of almonds
>for thousands of years. They were growing along the Nile in Biblical
>times, along with peaches and apricots. They all figure largely in
>North African cookery. The name probably derives from an almond growing
>area, and the chestnut cream may originally have been a substitute for a
>similar almond paste at a time of war when almonds were hard to come by.


Hi Kate,

I wondered about that, too, but sources I read indicated that there
didn't seem to be any significant almond production in Egypt itself
before the Romans, despite the usual hyperbole you find on the 'Net,
and there doesn't seem to have been much in the past few hundred
years, either. They seem in Ancient Egyptian times to have largely
been an imported luxury for the very rich. Currently the economy in
the Abu Qir area, (which is now a suburb of Alexandria) appears to
centre on seafood fishing, fertilizer production, and gas wells.