Praline is a sweet food made from a mix of nuts and boiled sugar, eaten as a confection or more commonly, an ingredient for other confections. In Europe, the nut is usually almonds but sometimes hazelnuts. In Louisiana and Texas, USA, pecans are almost always the nut used in pralines.
The French, who coined the name, consider praline to be boiled sugar over whole almonds, but in the rest of the world the almonds are ground and the praline is either a powder or a smooth paste. In Germany and Belgium praline means only a filled chocolate of any sort. In Britain the term can mean either kind of praline.
A favourite story of the origins of praline is that the Duke of Plessis-Praslin's cook invented a way to coat almonds with boiled sugar and later retired from the duke's service to make the sweets commercially.History
