It was the Arabs who spread the pistachio culture on the island, in fact there is a certain etymological affinity of the dialectal name given to the pistachio, with the corresponding Arabic term: “Frastuca” the fruit and “Frastucara” the plant, in Sicilian, while in Arabic the respective terms are “fristach”, “frastuch” and “festuch”!
However, this fruit has seen a real development starting from the second half of the nineteenth century in the provinces of Caltanissetta, Agrigento and Catania. In the latter, at the foot of the Etna volcano, in the territory of Bronte, it knows its maximum expansion so that in 1860 entire pastures and uncultivated land were transformed into pistachio groves and the cultivated plant became the fulcrum of the entire agricultural and economic system of the area.
Botanical notes
The Bronte pistachio plant, the Pistacea Vera, is a tree that could reach a height of over 10 meters, even if the farmers, through pruning, do not allow the tree to reach these heights, to better facilitate the harvest, which typically occurs every two years.
The pistachio plant has a lifespan of about 300 years, is very resistant to hot and dry climates, the autochthonous one of Bronte, which grows from Bronte to Ragalna, on the slopes of Etna, in the province of Catania, can sometimes also regrow after being knocked down by the volcano’s lava.
The pistachio tree has a sexual fluorescence, there is the male tree and the female tree, although in the botany stests it is specified that a male tree can fertilize up to ten female trees, in fact farmers plant a tree male for every five hundred female trees.
Given its extraordinary organoleptic quality, in general the Bronte pistachio has a market price of about double the foreign pistachio, but despite the high value its cultivation made by about a thousand farmers fails to give complete sustenance to families, but it constitutes an accessory to the family income.
From tree to table
The Bronte Pistachio is harvested from the first week of September every two years, after the first rains, and if there are no rains at the end of August, the farmer is forced to irrigate the plant a few days before harvesting, with the difficulty of the case, given that many plants are found in rocky and steep soils, which do not help in harvesting or irrigation.
As soon as the pistachio is harvested, it must be the primacy of the skin that covers the shell, the malleolus, and dried in the sun for at least three / four days, under penalty of parasitic infection.
After drying, the so-called Tignosella is first marketed, the farmer sells it to the transformer who, not his modern machinery, shells it.
In ancient times the pistachio was shelled in families, manually, on a lava stone with a partridge eye, which with its holes allowed the allocation of the tignosella, which, crossed in the tip by a hammer, left the fruit intact.
In the postwar period, an army general associated this hammering of the moth with a trigger that detonates bullets, thus imagining a pistachio machine gun, he invented the first machine to shell pistachio, loading the moth bullets in a cogwheel, traveled by a piston at a certain pressure, but having to repeat the process for unexploded bullets, giving more pressure to the piston.