By Mary Tutwiler

Growing up in New Orleans is a mixed blessing. There’s the naughty satisfaction of knowing, at the nascent age of nine, about barroom strippers, glimpsed through the open doorways on a Sunday night, while strolling after dinner down Bourbon Street, fingers clasped safely inside my grandmother’s large hand.

But there are other, innocent pleasures that sustain my memory of the realm of childhood—birthday rides on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, being coerced into wearing white cotton gloves when shopping on Canal Street, and the reward, a Nectar Soda from the soda fountain at the Katz & Besthoff on Canal, for being such a good girl.

The soda fountain at the K&B was a place where the many levels of New Orleans society met with equanimity. A little girl with white gloves could spin on the chrome sided barstools next to a stevedore with sweat-stained shirt taking a lunch break from his labor on the wharves.

The waitress with an inevitable New Orleans ninth-ward accent, which sounded like she had just stepped off the boat from the Bronx in New York, would “ax” my mother what I wanted.

It was always the same order, a BLT and a Nectar Soda. So named for the drink of the Olympian Gods, fuchsia pink nectar syrup is flavored with almond and vanilla. A few shots of the sweet syrup, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, and a blast of seltzer water which created a beautiful foamy head, shot through with a straw and iced tea spoon, were the elements of the classic Nectar Soda. I drank them at every opportunity, as did every native of New Orleans until K&B closed the last soda fountain in the early 1980s.

Hanson’s, the quirky Tchoupitoulas Street snowball stand, created an amazing concoction, the Snowblitz, using what had to be the last remaining hoard of nectar syrup. Fine-shaved snowball ice was steeped in nectar flavor, a scoop of ice cream layered in the middle of the cup, more nectar snowball over the ice cream, topped with condensed milk, marshmallow creme and a maraschino cherry. Home on a visit, I’d go with my friends and cool down from the summer heat with a Snowblitz, sit on the bench outside Hanson’s, and moan in youthful nostalgia for just one more nectar soda.

Perhaps it was the longing of my memory palate that made me become a food writer. Proust had his madeleine, Mary, her Nectar Soda. Nectar seems to be a flavor of place, unknown outside of the Crescent City. I thought it was lost forever until a box from Susan Dunham arrived on my doorstep. Dunham has recreated the K&B recipe and has been selling Nectar syrup in the New Orleans area. She has recently begun bottling ready-to-drink New Orleans Nectar Soda, a carbonated nectar flavored drink.

Dunham says the same mixture of nostalgia and connection (everybody in New Orleans is related) that seems to hold up the walls of an antique city like New Orleans drove her. Dunham’s grandmother was on recipe-swapping terms with members of the Lyons family. According to Dunham, Isaac L. Lyons, a turn of the century chemist who owned a wholesale drug company, I. L. Lyons, concocted and sold bottles of nectar syrup to K&B.

“One of my grandmother’s favorite things to make for her grandchildren was nectar sodas. She made the syrup herself from the Lyon’s recipe,” Dunham said.

Katz and Besthoff scion Sydney J. Besthoff said he is delighted that Nectar Sodas are once again available.

“Nectar is a wonderful product with an interesting flavor and such a beautiful pink color,” he said. “Having nectar back in the community provides continuity.”

Besthoff said that there were many purveyors of the nectar flavor in the early part of the century.

“Fuerst and Kremer was a sweet shop on Canal Street that operated between 1895 and 1915 or so. They served nectar sodas there. That business was in my wife’s family. Another old New Orleans company, Charles Dennery, made nectar syrup too, and sold it to K&B. Nectar seems to be a local flavor, like Barq’s root beer, or Dixie Beer, that was popular in New Orleans and nowhere else.”

In a fit of longing, Dunham unearthed her family’s old recipe, and trading on the pull of the past, which is nearly a national religion here in the South, she went to work with another local company, National Fruit Flavor, who was the syrup maker for Lyons back in the sweet old days. Dunham and the chemists worked with extract flavors of almond and vanilla in a culinary matching attempt no less difficult than mapping the human genome.

“There are hundreds of extracts of all grades,” Dunham said. “We worked to get the highest grade.”

The result is like a postcard from the past. Dunham’s nectar syrup, fizzed into a classic soda, or poured into a glass of milk the way my grandfather used to do for us at bedtime stimulates our oldest senses, taste and smell. Her new offering, New Orleans Nectar Soda, a carbonated soft drink, lets us carry a sip of the past into the flurry of a hurried new century. Either offering stirs the unconscious, stimulates a surge of memory. Who says you can’t go home again?

Filed Under: Food Talk