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.

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