Notable Sandwiches #124: The Muffuletta

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where David and I play host at the strange, overladen table that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a New Orleans icon: the muffuletta.

First of all, I want to say this: the muffuletta is innocent.

In fact, more than innocent: it’s beloved. New Orleanians—according to a quick, unscientific poll I conducted on Bluesky—adore it, for the sturdiness of its sesame-seed roll, the piquant and irreplaceable condiment that is Italian olive salad, and for the way it gains, rather than loses, savor over the course of a day or two. The salad (a complex mix of olives, giardiniera pickles, capers and other briny delicacies) soaks into the bun, the cured meats impart their spice to the whole, and thus waiting renders the muffuletta into an even more delicious, prized centerpiece to a meal. It’s more than just a bog-standard Italian sub. With its memorable particularities, it’s a regional masterpiece. 

Unlike so many of our notable sandwiches, there’s not much debate about the muffuletta’s origin. According to the “Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink,” it was invented at Central Grocery in the French Quarter in 1906, to give the newly-arrived Italian laborers a less-messy means of eating their typical antipasti-like lunch: “Arriving in significant numbers around the turn of the twentieth century, many of the immigrants were from Sicily, and they found employment in the French Quarter’s food industry. One such person was Signor Lupo Salvadore, who established Central Grocery in 1906. It is said that Lupo, taking a cue from Italian workers who would scoop broken olives from barrels onto the bread they brought for lunch, created the muffaletta sandwich.” The name comes from the disc-like loaf, which arrived in New Orleans in 1895, courtesy of a baker from Palermo.

“I would eat the bread and the juice left behind from the olive salad as my last meal on death row and be perfectly happy,” wrote one Bluesky respondent. 

“Like a lost loved one, I pine to hold it one in my hands again. One day,” wrote another.

Clearly this is a sandwich that inspires devotion in those who regularly encounter it—and powerful yearning in those separated from it.

That longing makes sense: a muffuletta is quite hard to get outside New Orleans—there are precious few spots even in New York, a pretty impeccable sandwich city, in which to taste it firsthand. This induces feelings of nostalgia in exiles from Nola, and insatiable recollection in those who have been long absent. Dwight Garner, an author and New York Times book critic, always keeps a Cochon muffuletta in the freezer, even though, as he told Grub Street, “It’s like nibbling the corner of a photograph of your college girlfriend while she’s away for the summer.” 

Suffice it to say, people really love this sandwich. And it is not the muffuletta’s fault that I am having a spectacularly bad day as I write this. A combination of an unfortunate professional setback (I am not a pro at dealing with rejection), my period arriving at the worst possible moment, and a failure to quit smoking after enduring hours of the itchy and monstrous nicotine craving have rendered me utterly useless. Not to mention that every time I log on or check the news, I’m bombarded with more and darker sallies into fascism by an administration that seems to relish lawlessness, incompetence, and cruelty in equal measure. 

The muffuletta is innocent, but I am a bad messenger for its glories. Particularly since I’ve never had one. (A better and less peevish version of this column would provide an impeccably researched précis on the delicious, violent, complicated history of Italian immigration to New Orleans, rather than mentioning my menstrual cycle.) The biggest impact of rising fascism is, of course, its direct impact—the deportations to gulags, the ever-spreading plagues, the gutting of science, the subjugation of women. But a secondary impact is a sense of constant wariness and irritability. Every time I encounter the news, I’m struck anew with devastation for what’s been lost, and fear for tomorrow. I can feel my escape window shutting, and the future narrowing. I’m snappish. Prickly. The joy gets sucked out of my life. I feel unreasonably angry at the fact that I must write about a sandwich. I am angry at the muffuletta! It doesn’t deserve it. It makes me wish I had encountered it during a better time.

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I’ve been to New Orleans twice; the first time was during my brief marriage, when I was very much in love, and the surroundings reflected that. It was spring, temperate and sunny, and while I didn’t eat a muffuletta, I ate po’boys, oysters by the dozen, drank my face off on Bourbon Street, soaked the hangover off with beignets and chicory-infused coffee, indulged in remoulade and turtle soup at the Commander’s Palace and less exalted étouffée and jambalaya at any one of the fantastic restaurants you can walk into around town. We had perfect, shatteringly crisp fried chicken at Li’l Dizzy’s in Treme—I have never had better—with side of dirty rice, gamy and starchy and delicious. In the French Quarter I had moules frites and listened to street jazz. And I was madly, so madly in love: so what I remember is spice and music, hands entwined, Spanish moss, gin-flavored kisses. I would like that week back again. This time I would eat a muffuletta.

The second time I visited I was divorced, and meeting someone for a tryst. I wasn’t in love with him, nor he with me, but I liked him. He was smart and kind. But we went in winter, and it rained the whole time. My companion, as it turned out, was a picky eater. I wanted to eat everything; he found my compulsion to consume vaguely disgusting, and only ate fries. I tried to rein in my desires, or at least make the trip less food-oriented. But the rain kept on, half the museums were unaccountably closed. I wanted to wander from restaurant to cafe to bar. Instead we dragged ourselves around the wet cobbles, and never met up again in any city, after that.

I don’t want all of my life now, even under this terrible pall, to be that second trip to New Orleans—full of irritability and gloom, knowing a dissolution is inevitable. But how do you go on joyfully when everything is so shit? How do you stop personal inconveniences from spiraling into part of the broader national decline in your thoughts, and vice versa—everything becoming a whirl of catastrophe? 

There’s no guide for negotiating the collapse of an empire into revanchist bigotry, let alone doing so in a psychologically healthy manner. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s impossible. (Unless you’re a part of joyously dismantling the edifices of justice and progress, in which case I hope all food is as ashes in your stupid mouth.) But I do think—I do—that we can’t deny ourselves joy. We can’t put barriers between ourselves and good things and the little pleasures that make life worth living on a daily basis. No successful revolution can occur from a basis of despair.

So I think about that yearned-for sandwich and I let myself yearn for it: for perfect salty olive salad and sturdy fresh-baked bread; for the magnificent layers, with which I am so blessedly familiar, of Italian cured meats. If life right now isn’t a garden of delights, let it at least be seasoned with some giardiniera. We all need a little spice to get us through.