Passionfruit Butter

Hansen’s Sno-Bliz.

Everywhere else in the world, a snowball is a roughly assembled weapon made out of the crunchy precipitation that infests the sidewalks. Everywhere else in the world, you don’t devour snowballs but rather hurl them in assault.

They will never understand.

Not when you drag them to the tattered screen door of Hansen’s on Tchoupitoulas. Not when, after waiting in the long line, you finally make it inside, where there’s a little bit of shelter from the beating-down sun. Not when they take in the myriad cut-outs from newspapers and magazines and Zagat surveys over the past several decades, a chorus of praise for this little snowball joint. Not when they’re warmly greeted at the counter, and not even amidst the loud grinding noise of the ice shaver.

But maybe they’ll come close when they take their first bite of this impossibly fine ice – as powdery-fresh as the snow we Southerners idealize but rarely see (an idea untainted by dirty brown slush polluting the sidewalks), flavored with Mrs. Hansen’s secret original recipes (and yes, there’s a patent on Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, which means you’ll never find the ice this good anywhere else). I’m a nectar cream devoté and can’t get my fix anywhere else (I tried recently at Plum Street, but it felt like I was inhaling corn syrup), but I always have my eye on other flavors, so I get two cups of the smallest size at one or two bucks a pop.

Here’s the spread from a recent trip I made with Jenna and some friends. Those are two nectar cream in the back, and that’s a lovely satsuma in the front. The syrup tastes as though it’s pure, unadulterated, un-doctored up juice from that dessert-like citrus that’s abundant here in the winter month. In effect, a satsuma snowball (and Hansen’s is the only snowball stand I know of that makes one) tastes like biting into a perfectly ripened fruit, minus the hassle of rind and pulp, plus the chilly frostiness that we inhale this time of year in New Orleans.