If you’re a fan of pistachio ice cream and gelato, then you may know from reading ingredients labels that many are secretly loaded with almonds. Large producers often balk at spending what they should on the pricey green nut. They advertise pistachio, and they often deliver mostly almond.

Sacrificing flavor, seeing dollar signs, they try to buffalo us. Sicily makes great use of pistachios. The green nuts appear in pestos and on cannoli. I have heard that there are many words for "pistachio" in the local dialect, almost like Inuits and "snow." Sicily's pistachio Mecca is a town called Bronte. Nuts from Bronte have been called “green gold.”