Nostalgia tastes like a pink sno-bliz

Is nostalgia nostalgia if you yearn for a past that isn’t your past?

From the moment you pull up to Hansen’s Sno-Bliz on Tchoupitoulas Street, you can tell that this famous sno-ball stand prides itself on its history. From the outside, it’s a whitewashed shack of a building. There’s a long bench along the wall and above that bench, two-foot high numbers indicating how long it’s been open, repainted every year in a bright pink-red.

It takes a while to see what’s inside because the line moves very slowly, but it’s worth the wait. Inside, the space is hot and fairly small, but everyone is unfailingly cheerful. The walls are plastered with photos and yellowing newspaper articles about Mary and Ernest Hansen, the original owners, and photos of happy customers through the years. Where there are no photos or articles, there are signs proclaiming, “There are no short cuts to quality,” as well a couple devout expressions of faith. In front, by the counter, is the famous ice-shaving machine, invented and patented by Ernest Hansen, to create a more sanitary sno-ball than others were selling in the 1930s.

One person mans the ice machine, another takes your money, and the last person carefully drizzles on the homemade syrup. It’s a slow, congenial operation. The man working the ice machine hands over the cup when it’s half full. Then the person in charge of the flavors pours on the syrup, making sure every last particle of ice soaks up some ungodly color, and then hands it back to the ice man, who tops it off so that the ice is twice as high as the cup. It then goes back to the syrup person who again is intent on making sure that syrup soaks through all the ice, oblivious to the syrup dripping all over her hand and the counter, though she will stop and wipe the counter clean after each order. Some of the flavors need to be refrigerated, which necessitates a step back to an ancient refrigerator. If there is a special request, like ice cream in the middle for a hot rod, or condensed milk and/or marshmallow fluff on top, that’s yet another step.

This is the opposite of fast food.

The flavors are made fresh everyday by Ashley Hansen, the current owner, just the way her grandmother did. There are the kind of flavors you’d expect, like blueberry and strawberry, but there’s a whole category of flavors prefixed with “cream of” that have gorgeous pastel hues. There’s cream of chocolate, cream of strawberry, even cream of ice cream, but the most popular is cream of nectar, which is a bright pink, a tinge more orange than Pepto-Bismol. And then there are “fancy flavors” like anise, ginger, and Satsuma, but these flavors are scrawled on a piece of white paper in different marker colors, and there are no promises that they are organic or all-natural. These are the kind of flavors that saturate your tongue until it turns a deep and satisfyingly orange, green or blue color.

You end up with something that looks craggy and uneven, as fantastic as the surface of a far-flung, sugar-spun outerspace world. But the sno-ball, the stand, the happy people waiting patiently in line, and the happy people slowly serving them evoke a deeply familiar feeling. You don’t have to grow up in New Orleans to remember what it feels like to have something sticky and sweet melting in your hand, to be hot but not care, and to look at something extremely fake in color and be entranced.

The best part? The sugary-sweet, ice-cold treat tastes as good as you remember. The ice is so cold, it tempers the sweetness of the flavors and transforms any cream you add, like condensed milk or marshmallow fluff, into something firmer, gooier, and more delicious. It’s more refreshing than ice cream would be in that heat. As their sign proclaims, you really can air-condition your tummy.

If you want to hear more about its history, pre and post-Katrina, you should hear it from the horse’s mouth. A summary of the Southern Foodways Alliance interview of Ashley Hansen and her father Gerard is here, with a full transcript that’s well worth reading.

Oysters buttered, oysters fried, oysters roasted, oyster pie!

Photo by Lika Miyake

New Orleans rewards eaters who aren’t squeamish. While other cities are famous for things like chili on spaghetti, New Orleans is famous for foods that are slimy, slippery, and buggy (if not amphibious).

That said, the way New Orleans robes its oysters in so much butter and fat, you might not recognize them as sea animals. I tasted oysters over a long weekend in 4 forms, not one of them raw. The BP oil spill showed how fragile the ecosystem is, but normally, Gulf Coast oysters are wild and plentiful, growing like weeds and thus suitable for inclusion in a “poor boy” sandwich. They can be eaten raw, but they’re too large and meaty to be swallowed quickly and daintily. Their shells are nearly as big as plates, which means they hold all kinds of sauces surprisingly, sometimes horrifying well.

Our first oysters were the char-grilled ones at Drago’s. I ate two, maybe even three, but I regretted it in the end. They had to be eaten quickly before the fat and cream congealed. I enjoyed the flavor—it’s butter!—but afterwards, it seemed like a waste of an oyster to smother its natural flavor like that.

Clockwise from top-left corner: roast beef, fried shrimp, and fried oyster.

Frying seemed more respectful, and I did enjoy the oyster po’boy at Tracey’s on Magazine Street a lot more. Crisply fried, clean-tasting, and a good foil to all the pickles and mayo. The fried shrimp po’boy was even better.

I only got a spoonful of the oyster and absinthe dome (see Slide 3) at Commander’s Palace, but this was a triumph, complex and delicate because the oysters had been lovingly bathed in cream, rather than drowned.

Before

But my favorite oysters were at Cochon, the hip Cajun restaurant that won the James Beard award for best chef in the South this year. They may be famous for their pork, but I was won over by their wood-fired oyster roast. The garlicky, spicy sauce was so good I licked my bivalve clean.

After

One day, I hope I can return and eat some local oysters nice and raw. It’s still not clear whether the local oyster industry is really back—the flooding hasn’t helped—but it’s nice to know that this weekend, people at the New Orleans Oyster Festival will be cheering for its full return.

Beign-yay!

I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis about this blog.

What is the point?

What is the point of food writing in general? Do we really need to know what someone thinks about the same food that thousands, if not millions of other people have also tasted? What value does food writing add to the world? Does my food writing add any value to the world?

No answers yet. In the meantime, Diane insists I keep writing before my despair takes over the cookbook project, so I’m adding my two cents to all the millions of words that have already been written about food in New Orleans.

This past Memorial Day weekend, my college girlfriends and I traveled to New Orleans for our annual reunion. I can’t say that I fell in love with New Orleans. It was too hot to fall in love with anything or anyone. The food that New Orleans is most famous for—fried, buttered, po’boy-ed—is the kind of food that, at least for this Northerner, tastes best in cooler weather, when you want to pack on the insulation.

But beignets are different. By definition, they are fried squares of dough blanketed in copious amounts of powdered sugar. They have no right to taste light, ethereal, and inconsequential on a hot summer night. Yet somehow they do at Cafe du Monde.

With seven women flying in from seven different locations on a major holiday weekend, we were relatively grateful that five of us managed to get in late Friday night. We headed to Café du Monde straight from the airport. Open 24 hours, this famed cafe sits at the edge of the French Quarter near the Mississippi River, far enough away from Bourbon Street to feel like a brightly lit refuge, with its green and white awning glowed in the night.

Not that there’s any real Old World charm. The coffee is served in Styrofoam cups with flimsy plastic lids. The chairs are equally flimsy, clustered around laminate tables looking ever so faintly like marble. The ceiling fans do little to move the hot air. The service is slow and not particularly gracious, and the floor tiles are noticeably sticky.

But as I bit into a beignet and puffs of powdered sugar fell on the floor and on me, I knew why the floor was sticky. I knew others had done the same all day, with probably the same joy and surprise that this tourist trap actually served fresh, hot, delicious donuts with the unmistakable flavor of good, serious dough. If the floor was sticky with the residue of a hundred thousand beignets, so be it. If the night was sweltering, so be it.

I think that’s what I loved most, the feeling that nothing at that moment mattered as much as catching up with some of my closest friends, eating beignets and slurping frozen cafe au laits in the middle of the night. The donut is not the best donut in the world, and the coffee is not the best coffee in the world. But both are honest, real pleasures.

(The forced debauchery of Bourbon Street, not so much.)

So hooray, New Orleans! Beign-yay!

(One of the best T-shirt designs at Storyville on Magazine Street.)