Pistachio Memories

My favorite food-related memory from childhood is red-tipped fingers. As I was growing up, pistachio nuts were always dyed red. For many decades after this practice stopped, I thought it was because red dye was considered dangerous. I found out just recently that was a complete misunderstanding on my part. According to The Spruce Eats, red pistachios used to be imported from the Middle East and were blanched and discolored. To make them more attractive, they were dyed red. In the 1980s, there was a huge increase in American grown pistachios. There was no longer a need to dye the pistachios red because they no longer had unappetizing stains.
Back in my childhood, red pistachios were a favorite gift for the holidays. I grew up with a bag of them in my stocking every Christmas. And every January, my fingers were red-tipped.
Why did my fingers get so red? The dye didn’t come off that easily. But in order to open the pistachios, I had to use my teeth to pry them apart, then get the nut from the shell with my fingers. The wet shells did cause the dye to come off on my fingers, so after about 10 nuts, my fingertips would be colored red.
Why did I have to use my teeth instead of my fingernails to pry open the shells? Because I bit my nails. Badly. My poor nails were far too short to pry open anything.
As I sat here tonight, eating about 50 pistachios and watching a Hallmark movie, I suddenly was overwhelmed by the memory of those red-tipped, little girl fingers. I might have escaped my childhood without that memory, had it not been for a terrible parenting blunder my father made.
I apparently didn’t bite my nails the first six years of my life. Coincidently, my sixth Christmas was the year I discovered pistachios. But that year, sometime in the early fall, my father was sitting next to me and picked up my hand and said, “I’m so glad you don’t bite your nails like your brothers.”
I had two older brothers and I guess they both bit their nails. I hadn’t noticed, to be truthful. But this was the colossal blunder dad made. You see, I loved my father and I always wanted to please him. But I idolized my brothers.
They bit their nails? Well, then, so did I. That very night, lying in my bed, I started to pick and bite at those fingernails.
Let me digress to say that I was able to quit that horrible habit in my late 20’s, but my nails have never been strong or long. I keep them clipped short to make sure I don’t fall back into that habit.
Fortunately, breaking the nail-biting habit coincided with pistachios being prevalent without dye and with my marriage to a wonderful man, who always puts a bag of pistachios in my Christmas stocking.
So while I sit here contemplating a few more pistachios, and looking at my unbitten nails, I remember that little girl. She wanted so much to be like her brothers, and she loved pistachios. Turns out, not much has really changed in all those years. Just the fingertips.