Aleppo Pistachio

Ask for pistachios in Arabic and the city is already in the name: fustuq halabi, the Aleppo nut. The word goes back to Aramaic fistqa, and the tree is native to Central Asia and the Levant. Pliny listed the pistachio among the trees particular to Syria and recorded how it reached Italy: Lucius Vitellius, then Roman governor of Syria, carried it west around AD 35.

How the tree works

Pistachio trees are male or female, never both, so an orchard bears nothing unless it holds the two together; pollen from one male covers 8 to 12 females. A young tree needs 7 to 10 years before it gives a serious crop, and it can live for 300 years. Yield swings on a two-year cycle. Heavy one season, thin the next.

How the harvest happens

As the fruit ripens the outer hull turns from green to yellow and red, and the hard shell splits open by itself with an audible pop. After picking, the hull is stripped, the kernels are dried, then sorted into open-mouth and closed-mouth. A closed shell is hard to crack by hand, and the proportion of them on a tray tells you what the price is really buying.

How to tell a good kernel

The skin should be mauve. The flesh under it is a pale green. If you see shells dyed red or green, ask about it: the dye was there to hide the stains left by hand picking, and it serves no purpose today. Never take nuts with grey or black mould markings, because badly dried or damply stored pistachios carry a real aflatoxin risk. Buying in the shell is safer than buying kernels, since the shell keeps damp and other smells away from the nut.

Where it appears on the table

The pastry trade of Aleppo and Damascus runs on this nut: crusted over barazek biscuits, scattered on knafeh, rolled inside halawet el-jibn, pressed against a scoop of ice cream. On the savoury side it is simply roasted and eaten with tea or coffee. Nut sellers keep raw and roasted apart. Say which you want, or roasted goes on the scale.