SFA | Oral History | New Orleans Eats

“A Snow-Bliz is a finely shaved, almost hollow type of ice-shavings where the syrup does not go all the way through. You actually put the syrup on in layers to get consistency throughout the body of the sno-ball. So therefore, the flavor stays with you throughout the process of eating it.”

– Gerard Hansen

“First you have a sundae…And then after the sundae you have a Duper, and from a Duper you’ve got a Baby Duper and a Super Duper, and the—the difference between the Baby Duper and the Super Duper is the size of the cup. But on the top you have on both ice, syrup, cream, crushed pineapple, marshmallow and a cherry. And marshmallow is this thick, goopy, creamy stuff that is so good, and when it’s on the cold sno-ball it gets extra chewy and it sticks to everything and it’s so much fun. It’s so awesome.”

– Ashley Hansen

The story of Hansen’s Sno-Bliz is the sort that New Orleanians love to tell. It involves a business built and sustained by three generations of one New Orleans family, it has a welcome post-Katrina happy ending despite some tragic twists, and its core narrative is all about sweetness. Ernest Hansen, a machinist by trade and an inveterate tinkerer, built his first Sno-Bliz ice-shaving machine in the 1930’s so that he could make sno-balls for his family. Soon enough his wife Mary parked the apparatus on the sidewalk beneath a Chinaball tree and began hawking freeform clouds of shaved ice drenched in homemade flavored syrups for two-cents a pop—a penny more than the going rate at the time.

The business moved several times over the years, eventually landing in the cinderblock building on Tchoupitoulas Street where so many New Orleanians find reprieve during the hottest months. Cream of nectar, cream of chocolate, spearmint, orangeade, and Ernest’s Own root beer – all made daily — are among the favorite syrup flavors, but for many customers the Hansens themselves are the main reason for patronizing the shop.

Ernest and Mary both passed away before they could return to the city post-Katrina. They had been married for 72 years. Their granddaughter Ashley, who already had been working with them for nearly a decade, now runs the business, often with help from her father Gerard. Ashley carries on Ernest and Mary’s warmth as well as their recipes.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Ashley & Gerard Hansen describing the interior of Hansen’s Sno-Bliz. Go here to download the player for free.]

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subjects: Ashley and Gerard Hansen
Location: Tchoupitoulas Street, New Orleans
Date: August 7, 2006
Interviewer: Sara Roahen, writer and SFA member

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Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday August 7th 2006 and I’m on Tchoupitoulas Street, next door to Hanson’s Sno-Bliz. So could I get you guys both to say your name, your date of birth and how you make your living?

Gerard Hansen: Okay, I’m Gerry Hansen. I was born February 9th 1939, and my primary occupation is a Judge in the Criminal section in the Federal Court — Judges Magistrate Section.

Ashley Hansen: My name is Ashley Hansen and I am 33. I was born on August 22nd 1973, and I make my living by running our family sno-ball stand.

Can you tell me the name of the stand?

AH: It’s called Hansen’s Snow-Bliz.

And describe your relationship — how you’re related?

GH: Well Ashley is my daughter. I have two daughters; they are twins. And they are the only two children I have.

Okay, and I guess why don’t we start, for the record, by describing — tell me what a sno-ball is.

AH: A sno-ball is a cup of finely shaved ice with a simple syrup on top that’s flavored with all kinds of different flavors, like chocolate or strawberry.

Is there a difference in your mind between a sno-ball and a snow cone, which is what us Northerners grew up on?

GH: Well a snow cone is a little more coarse than—it’s a difference between a sno-ball, a snow cone, and a Sno-Bliz. The snow cone is very coarse; the syrup will go right through to the bottom instead of to the top.

AH: Like a slushy.

GH: Right, a sno-ball is basically the same thing as a snow cone, but a Snow-Bliz is a finely shaved, almost hollow type of ice-shavings where the syrup does not go all the way through. You actually put the syrup on in layers to get consistency throughout the body of the [Sno-Bliz-style] sno-ball. So therefore, the flavor stays with you throughout the process of eating it.

That’s a good introduction to how the Snow-Bliz came to be. So can either one of you — both of you — talk about the beginning of the business?

AH: Sure. The beginning of the family business was when my grandfather had his first son, my Uncle Ernie, and Uncle Ernie wanted a sno-ball, and at the time all they had was big blocks of ice that a man in a cart would come around and you’d pick your flavor and he would shave the ice with his hand with a shaver almost similar to a kitchen door planer. And it would get real dirty because of your hands and the sweat and the atmosphere, and my grandfather said, I want to make something for my children that is not touched by a hand. And so he got to work in 1933, and in 1934 he came up with his first ice-shaving machine.

Hmm. So it was kind of like—so that—would that have been when you were growing up? Do you remember those hand-shaved—?

GH: By the time I—I was born and started to grow up there were sno-ball machines. My father’s was the first motor driven machine, and that’s why he was able to get the patent on that machine. We never wanted to go elsewhere for a sno-ball because we had the best, so we always ate from the Snow-Bliz machine, you know, and in contests they would give us the best and no one would—no one in the family would get sick of the ice and hands touching the ice. My mother saw—saw the potential in this and said, well it’s so good why don’t we just share it with the rest of the city? And so then she started—she started the actual business. And she actually started the business in 1936.

What kind of flavors did you have when you were growing up?

GH: You didn’t have as many flavors. You may have had maybe 10 flavors and then most of them were your basic flavors: blueberry, grape, or you know things like that, and she started adding some special flavors like chocolate, pineapple, cream of nectar. And then as time went on, whenever we would travel, Mother would come up with an idea like cream of coconut when we were in Florida and she had to drink coconut milk out of a coconut and she said, oh this is wonderful; I’m going to go back and develop a coconut flavor. And—and did, and then she decided to make it a cream of coconut. A lot of flavors were just discarded because she didn’t feel they could meet the quality she wanted. And—and after a time we included some of the flavors we have today, and I don’t remember—Ashley could tell you—.

AH: I think we have maybe 22 flavors.

GH: And why we don’t have a much larger number [is] because she didn’t believe—she believed in making flavors fresh every day. So if you had a flavor that was leftover it got either turned to icebergs or thrown away. She would not save that flavor for the next day, and so she wanted to keep the numbers down so she wouldn’t waste a lot of flavors.

What’s an iceberg?

AH: Icebergs are little Dixie Cups filled with simple syrup and a little bit of water, and they’re frozen solid and you just squeeze the bottom of the Dixie Cup and you can sort of lick it like a Popsicle.

And do you sell them?

GH: We do, for like 75-cents, and sometimes I just give them away to the kids.

AH: We go through maybe—maybe over 500-pounds of sugar a weekend and 1,200-pounds of ice a weekend.

Wow, and that ice gets delivered weekly or—?

AH: What we used to do every Saturday — my grandparents used to close the sno-ball stand and they would go pick out the ice because you’d have to go early to beat the shrimpers to get the good ice and—and every Saturday even at the end I started helping them with my dad and Otis and a few other people. We would chop the ice up with an ice pick.

GH: The process would take about five hours; now we do it in about 45-minutes but—

AH: She [Mary] didn’t want to give her customers anything that she wouldn’t have wanted to eat, so she took the best care in producing something.

GH: So every night we would spend an hour and a half cleaning everything up before we left because she never wanted any ants or roaches, etcetera, and she would always say a famous saying: make sure it’s not sticky-sticky-sticky. We still do the work but we’re just fast. They was old; they wasn’t moving as fast, you know, and so I would go—and I’ve been helping them for the last 30 years or so, and I’d go and they wouldn’t let me do nothing but clean up.

AH: And you were the bouncer. A security guard. Well also what like I to say is they always felt that they wanted their sons to do something better than a sno-ball stand, so my uncle became a doctor and my dad became a judge. He was very proud of everyone and he didn’t want to mess up anyone’s fingers or, you know, he wanted—he didn’t want people to be sno-ball people. He wanted his children to have titles, and so did my grandmother.

And so what was the reaction when you came in and wanted to help?

AH: I don’t know, I was more of the pet. I kind of snuck in I think.

GH: And then the time came that they actually needed her and so out of necessity they saw—and then they—they was afraid that the business would not survive; there was no one else. They were sure my brother and I would not run the business, so now it was up to someone else and they felt that as time went on that she was the heir apparent, and then they worked with her and she worked with them.

AH: Beautifully — it was one of the best parts of my life. In 1995 I graduated from Loyola here in town and I spent a winter in Chicago — just one winter. That’s all it took and I came back to town and that summer I said, come on, aren’t we going to do the sno-ball stand? And I thought at that point they may have been ready to give it to me or hand it over in some sort of old-fashioned rigor and oh no—no. In fact, my enthusiasm was so contagious that they were ready to go the very next day, to go get all our sugar and supplies, and that couldn’t have been better for me or for them. For the next maybe four years we did it — all the three of us.

So they — for the record — they didn’t make it back to New Orleans after the storm [Katrina]?

AH: They’re still not here.

GH: No, well, Mother was airlifted to Pineville, Louisiana. Dad was almost left at Touro [Hospital] because he wasn’t a patient. He wasn’t admitted and they were not going to take care of him, and thank God they let the two sitters we had stay with him, and they got him out. They got somebody to carry him down eight flights of steps, because he was in a wheelchair. And they put him in a van and he ended up in Alexandria. And he was panicking and wanted to know where she was and—and thank God she actually was literally only 10 blocks away. And so when we found them he actually would go and sneak up to the hospital. She was like in a coma then but he—he would go sit there and then we would bring him back to the hospital at night. My brother lives in Thibodaux, and after Mother died you couldn’t come back to New Orleans and bury her—.

AH: It was only two weeks after the storm hit.

GH: So Mother died and so my brother, who had got a tomb in Thibodaux, said, well you know we’ll bury Mama here, so they buried her there and then he [Ernest] stayed there because he didn’t want to be far away from her. You know he hadn't been away from her for 30 years, so I mean he didn’t want to be far away.

AH: Didn’t even go to K&B [drugstore] apart.

GH: As far as he [Ernest] was concerned it was Mary’s business. It was Mary who did this; Mary developed it; Mary kept it going, you know, and when he died [about six months after Mary] I think we got a bigger response than we did with my mother ‘cause they did a beautiful article on him in the paper and his article went statewide. We were getting calls from all over—

AH: And we’re still getting calls from all over the nation. And people left—it was so sad and beautiful that people left flowers and pictures of kids eating sno-balls and all kinds of things out in front of the sno-ball stand in remembrance. We’ve lost so much in New Orleans and we lost a generation of people and—and it’s just nice to be able to hold onto a few things that haven’t changed, you know, so we wanted to keep the sno-ball stand going at least this year for that reason.

GH: Well I’m going to go back again when they first opened and I’ll tell the story Mary always told. When they first opened they were actually operating their sno-ball machine under a Chinaball tree on the sidewalk out of my grandmother’s house—

AH: On Saint Ann Street.

GH: And so anyway—so they actually put the machine on a table and they run a cord through the window so they could have electricity and they would operate the machine, ice in the ice-chest you know, and they would charge you two-cents and it was in a scoop, a little scoop—

AH: Little cardboard tray.

GH: You got no straw, no spoon, and you ate it like a puppy dog. And remember this is 1936 in the middle of the Depression, all right, and so people would come and say, are you crazy? I mean you paid two-cents for ice and syrup? The hand-shaved things were only a penny, and Daddy said, I have something better and it’s going to be two-cents. And Mother said people would come with their children and they would say, oh hi Mrs. Hansen; we just came to visit, you know, we don’t want a sno-ball today. And she knew they didn’t have any money. So she’d say, oh but today is treat day for children, and she’d give them free sno-balls because she was also very charitable. And the other thing I’m proud of is that, you know, that was the years of segregation, but at Hansen’s there was never a separate window; there was never a moment when a person of any color couldn’t walk in and get a sno-ball. And she made more friends, you know, by doing that and people didn’t forget. A couple years ago — many years ago — there was a bill in the legislature to put judges in districts and one of the districts they wanted to put me in was a district that I probably wouldn’t have gotten reelected in. And a black legislator, who is a very powerful female black legislator, she fought to the death to save me from going in that district. And I said, why are you doing this for me? She said, when I was young your mama took care of me and I’m not going to let you get hurt now.

Well one thing I was going to ask you about is that there’s such a distinct look of the place. Can you sort of describe what it looks like for people who will be listening to this?

AH: [Sighs] Well you walk in and you don’t know quite where to look first. There is stuff everywhere — pictures line the wall; there’s drawings; there’s hangings; there’s signs that say read this sign first; there’s signs that say—that advertise our special Bliz(es); there’s all kinds of different prices signs; there’s signs that say don’t run; don’t lean on the glass counter; don’t smoke; no pets; and there’s pictures everywhere — pictures from the ‘50s, from the ‘40s, there’s pictures from the ‘70s and ‘80s, and all of our customers with big buckets, and the floor has been painted 67 times ‘cause we’ve painted every year, so it’s 67 different shades of red, and a yellow line that directs you into the counter.

GH: And the sign that says follow the yellow line. You follow the yellow brick—he loved that slogan from the Wizard of Oz, and you know it’s amazing. People will walk in — even when there’s nobody in the place and we’re just opening up, they immediately go to follow the lines. They’ll walk the line because of the color; they could walk clear across and walk right up to the counter and they don’t. they walk the line and they’ve been trained so long where they had to do that they do it automatically, you know.

I wanted to ask Ashley: do you feel pressure that this is what — not just your family wants, but what the community wants of you?

AH: I think I’ve felt that pressure at times in my life. And you know having 90-some odd year-old grandparents to take care of too and help with that responsibility was pressure, and always trying to live up to their standards. But I think that’s also part of being part of a family and a family tradition, like as much as it was hard on you there were too many benefits, you know. And I kind of feel about that now like, although there is some pressure to reopen and to keep going there are too many benefits, there are too many memories, there are too many smells and scents that I couldn’t live without in the place. There’s too many friends we’ve made, there’s too many customers, there’s too many kids growing up that I can't wait to see every day. No, I don’t have any regrets about opening, and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do, you know and—and I never really wanted two jobs. I always just wanted one job. I love cooking [in restaurant kitchens] but it was more of, how do I sustain myself until summertime? And then I can go work back with my grandparents. And to me it’s a very, very special place and I think there is some pressure but nothing that I wouldn’t take on if I didn’t want to.

GH: Let me conclude by saying one more thing if you don’t mind. I want to say that you know — if you look at the recent articles and you look at, you know, what has happened since we reopened, you can tell that this is Ashley’s business. I mean Ashley is making her own name. She’s making some changes, yes; change is always good. She’s made her own reputation, and although people might say, she looks like your mama and she smiles like your mama, she has you know—Ashley is Sno-Bliz now and Ashley is handling it — not me and my brother; it’s Ashley and she has stepped into the tradition so easily. People come in and ask for Ashley, you know. They know mom and dad is gone, and they don’t come in and say, hey where is the Judge? They say, where’s Ashley?

AH: One experience I had this weekend — or maybe it was last weekend — but this little boy who I’ve seen grow up on Tchoupitoulas Street, obviously is dirt poor—is dirty half the time I see him. And he never would talk to me, never would smile, never; you know, barely knew how to order something. And he came in two weeks ago and looked at me and said, you want to see my new bike? with a big grin. And I was like, of course. [Laughs] And of course I treated him to a sno-ball too and anything else he wanted ‘cause he was so cute. [Laughs]

GH: But the tradition goes on.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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