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On my desk as I write this I have a packet of shelled, unsalted pistachios, a snack about which I have no particular feelings beyond the fact they’re better for me than Hula Hoops and, like so many things I’ve been persuaded to buy by my doctor, can be integrated into a “heart healthy diet”. Pistachios are also, it turns out, having a moment. We’ve been here before, with pomegranates and acai and, a few years ago, bone broth and anchovies. Now it’s the turn of the upmarket green peanut (oh look, I do have an opinion), which, once you start noticing it, you’ll find appears to be everywhere.
It started last year with the rise of what is informally known as Dubai chocolate, the so-called confectionery invented by the British-Egyptian entrepreneur Sarah Hamouda, that took over the world – and that became, according to Deliveroo, one of last year’s top items ordered worldwide. If you haven’t encountered it, the Can’t Get Knafeh Of It chocolate bar is a fancy slab of milk chocolate stuffed with a mixture of shredded filo, date syrup and pistachio cream, which tastes like a blocked artery and looks like wet tobacco. The original bar – the market is teeming with knock-offs – costs about £15.99, and if you can finish it in one sitting I raise my cholesterol to you.
Starbucks, meanwhile, which has been flirting with pistachio flavouring for a few years now, has pushed its pistachio velvet latte and iced pistachio latte to the front of its UK menus. If you’re in the US, in Boston you can order a pistachio martini, or a pistachio croissant from bakeries in downtown New York. Last year, Americans ate 225,000 tonnes of pistachios, making them the world’s biggest pistachio consumers, while in Britain, Marks & Spencer just launched the extra thick pistachio and milk chocolate egg, featuring “pistachio truffle”. At £20 a pop, this provoked the Mirror to report instances of British shoppers encountering the egg and becoming, as they put it, “startled”. High end nuts will do that.
And I mean, it’s a solid snack. Right? For people who pay attention to these things, the fact that pistachios are lower in fat than peanuts will be very important, as is the fact that pistachios are tree nuts and peanuts are legumes. Pistachios are posh, I have no idea why – probably via some lingering association with their “exotic” provenance, which historically is the Middle East, not the west. No one says “pistachio” and thinks of Jimmy Carter. They’re not a bar nut. Americans might eat them by the sack-load, but the word “pistachio” derives from the Persian. And they’re expensive, roughly double the cost of a peanut because of the longer growing time and the more onerous harvest. No one is saying it’s a macadamia, but still: that’s a luxury nut.
Like a lot of individual ingredients that go through a moment of wild popularity, there is a health rationale undergirding the pistachio stampede that is completely legitimate if you enjoy plain, unsalted pistachios and less relevant if you eat one submerged in three inches of lard and encased in a chocolate straitjacket. The pistachio martini, for example, is made from pistachio cream, vanilla vodka and chocolate liqueur, which sounds even less healthy to me than vermouth. Still, just saying the word “pistachio” evokes intimations of a life in a healthy and soothing pale green, backed up by echoes of words we know to be good for us, even if their meaning remains vague – “antioxidants”, “anti-inflammatories”, “potassium” and “Farrow & Ball” – and that make us feel better about life.
Of course, people can’t help themselves and take things too far. I saw a recipe recently for “pistachio pesto” – nobody wants that. If my fish comes encrusted in pistachio instead of breadcrumbs I’ll be livid. And I don’t want the pistachio latte, obviously, an item made exclusively for adults who, when no one is looking, will happily tuck into a bowl of Oreo cereal or be tempted by the words pumpkin spice. I am eating these extremely plain nuts, no salt, no dry roast, no chocolate shell and no incentive – beyond the warm glow of knowing my arteries and I are precisely on trend.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
