The shell of the pistachio is naturally a beige color, but it is sometimes dyed red or green in commercial pistachios. Commercial cultivars vary in how consistently they split open.Įach pistachio tree averages around 50 kilograms (110 lb) of seeds, or around 50,000, every two years. The splitting open is a trait that has been selected by humans. This is known as dehiscence, and happens with an audible pop.
When the fruit ripens, the shell changes from green to an autumnal yellow/red and abruptly splits partly open.
The seed has a mauve-colored skin and light green flesh, with a distinctive flavor. The fruit has a hard, cream-colored exterior shell. The seed, commonly thought of as a nut, is a culinary nut, not a botanical nut.
The fruit is a drupe, containing an elongated seed, which is the edible portion. Swingle's pistachios from Syria had already fruited well at Niles, California, by 1917. In 19, David Fairchild of the United States Department of Agriculture introduced hardier cultivars to California collected from China, but it was not promoted as a commercial crop until 1929. In the 19th century, the pistachio was cultivated commercially in parts of the English-speaking world, such as Australia along with New Mexico and California where it was introduced in 1854 as a garden tree. They are cultivated across southern Europe and north Africa. Pistachio trees were introduced from Asia to Europe in the 1st century AD by the Romans. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were said to have contained pistachio trees during the reign of King Merodach-Baladan about 700 BC. Īrchaeologists have found evidence from excavations at Jarmo in northeastern Iraq for the consumption of Atlantic pistachio. The early sixth-century manuscript De observatione ciborum ("On the observance of foods") by Anthimus implies that pistacia remained well known in Europe in Late Antiquity.Īn article on pistachio tree cultivation is brought down in Ibn al-'Awwam's 12th-century agricultural work, Book on Agriculture. Pliny the Elder writes in his Natural History that pistacia, "well known among us", was one of the trees unique to Syria, and that the seed was introduced into Italy by the Roman Proconsul in Syria, Lucius Vitellius the Elder (in office in 35 AD) and into Hispania at the same time by Flaccus Pompeius.
It appears in Dioscorides' writings as πιστάκια : pistákia, recognizable as P. vera was first cultivated in Bronze Age Central Asia, where the earliest example is from Djarkutan, modern Uzbekistan. Archaeology shows that pistachio seeds were a common food as early as 6750 BC. The pistachio tree is native to regions of Central Asia, including present-day Iran and Afghanistan. Pistachio is from late Middle English "pistace", from Old French, superseded in the 16th century by forms from Italian "pistacchio", via Latin from Greek πιστάκιον " pistákion", from Middle Persian "*pistak" (the New Persian variant being پسته " pista").