Pine nut meticulous person) and are an essential component of Italian pesto sauce; the upsurge in the popularity of this sauce since the 1990s has increased the visibility of the nut in America, primarily on the West Coast. "Torta della nonna" (literally "granny's cake") is a generic Italian dish name that in most families indicates an old family recipe for any kind of cake but often is used for a tart or a pie filled with custard, topped with pine nuts and optionally dusted with icing sugar. "Pignoli" cookies, an Italian American specialty confection (in Italy these would be called "biscotti ai
Zanthoxylum piperitum the aroma. The young leaves are crushed and blended with miso using "suribachi" (mortar) to make a paste, a pesto sauce of sorts, and then used to make various "aemono" (tossed salad). The stereotypical main ingredient for the resultant "kinome-ae" is the fresh harvest of bamboo shoots, but the sauce may be tossed (or delicately "folded") into sashimi, clams, squid or other vegetable such as "tara-no-me" (angelica-tree shoots). The immature green berries, blanched and salted, are called "ao-zanshō" (). The berries are traditionally simmered into dark-brown "tsukudani", but nowadays are also available as "shoyu-zuke", which is just steeped in soy