The critically-acclaimed comedy to £14 easter egg pipeline

Does Nicky Haslam’s ‘Common List’ teatowel translate outside the UK? I’m risking it not doing, and mentioning it anyway, because I enjoy it so much. If you’ve not seen the designer’s most recent directory of infra dig, I’m delighted to tell you it includes ‘Aperol anything,’ ‘Podcasts,’ ‘aliens,’ ‘ordering lobster’ and–my favourite–‘being proud of your adult children.’

As I’m terminally behind the curve, I suspect any prediction I make will de facto not appear in Haslam’s 2024 list. This is a shame, because there’s a real case to be made for one thing that will shortly look dated as hell: pistachio. 

I think the moment pistachio officially went mainstream—its Devil Wears Prada, ‘filtered down through the department stores and then into some tragic Casual Corner’ moment—was the recent launch of a Sainsbury’s Pistachio Tiramisu. Curiously, it didn’t pop into my Instagram feed via @pistachioinlondon, an account I follow which—well, I’m sure you can guess. Pistachio doughnuts topped with ice cream, pistachio in pasta sauce, in Croatian salads, in Colombian Easter cake, in £1 Whitechapel croissants, with cheesecake, with baklava, in almond biscuits and chocolate cups for Lidl Italian week, pistachio on candy floss with a spun sugar crown.

Here’s my theory. In the Autumn and Winter of 2022, Season 2 of The White Lotus—a dark American comedy-drama about how a resort holiday is essentially an extended bottle episode—aired on TV, prompting a whole load of people who at that point were both arriving at and leaving the office in the dark to book spring visits to Sicily. There they ate pistachios: grown in the gritty lavic soil at the base of Mount Etna and made into little paper cups of gelato for them to pick at while shopping for limoncello and pinecone magnets in Taormina.

Back in London, influencers started sharing their best pistachio finds, capitalising on a growing interest in over-the-top pastries which both look great on camera and make for an affordable shared treat now young people don’t go to the pub. This Easter, Waitrose created a ‘Cracking’ Easter egg made to look like a giant pistachio. People loved it. They’re selling on eBay. 

Like burrata, like bone broth, like sundried tomato and foams (misc.), pistachio will inevitably soon become passé. I’m not sure what will come next, but judging by the absolute chokehold girolles have on London’s chefs recently, I’m betting on some big times ahead for the humble mushroom.

What’s compelling about all this isn’t necessarily TV making a food popular¹—back in the 1970s, Delia Smith caused such a run on a certain brand of lemon zester that producers ended up sending suppliers warning lists ahead of her programmes—but the intersection of different cultural forces that came together to make pistachio the ingredient of the moment.

From a drama whose breakthrough second series made it cool to travel to the south of Italy, to the post-COVID travel boom that prompted people to book, and right through to the TikTok personalities who realised bored young people will gladly watch a hundred croissants spilling their insides on camera, a lot of things came together to give one little green nut so much prominence on UK supermarket shelves in summer 2024. I wonder if the Cannon Street Sainsbury’s has that tiramisu.

1. Although it is interesting that The Bear, a program all about cooking, hasn’t created hype around any specific dish.