The regional table / Louisiana
Muffuletta
Nothing here is cooked. The work is a day of waiting for the olive salad and two hours of weight on the loaf, and both of them are doing something you can taste.
The earliest dated appearance of the word that could be reached for this article is not from 1906 and not from a New Orleans paper. It is a United Press International column by Royal Brightbill, headed New Orleans muffuletta home, printed in the Griffin Daily News of Griffin, Georgia on 29 July 1976. It gives the sandwich in a single sentence — slices of provolone cheese, Genoa salami and Italian ham topped with a freshly made, well-seasoned olive salad and tucked between slices of the special muffuletta loaf, a 10-inch crusty disc sprinkled with sesame seeds — and prices it at about $2.40 for a sandwich that feeds two adults. Five spellings were searched to find it: muffuletta, muffaletta, muffeletta, muffoletta and mufaletta. Louisiana has no newspaper archive that answers a script at all, so an earlier printing almost certainly exists in New Orleans and could not be opened from here; what follows is dated to what was actually read.
That column is also the reason the famous origin claim is not repeated here. Frank Tusa, co-owner of Central Grocery on Decatur Street opposite the French Market, is quoted in it, and the reporter notes the sign out front identifying the shop as the home of the original muffuletta. But the column says in its own voice that no one is quite sure who created the sandwich, although it is generally agreed it came into being about the turn of the century. No year and no inventor — from the shop that claims it, in print, in 1976. What is documented, and federally, is why there was a Sicilian grocery opposite that market to begin with. The Immigration Commission printed its Reports in 1911, and Part 24 of Immigrants in Industries, Recent Immigrants in Agriculture, gives a whole chapter to Kenner, Louisiana, ten miles west of the city: 150 Italian families, all of them natives of Sicily, on farms of two to ten acres. Some of the Italians, the report says, drive into New Orleans during the night with loads of produce and take their stands in the Old French Market ready for the morning trade. The same volume calls Sicilians among the least desirable of all South European immigrants now coming to the United States, and then concedes in the next clause that their success in Louisiana warrants a more careful consideration. That is the neighborhood this sandwich comes out of, and that is what the federal record thought of the people who built it.
Why this version works
The olive salad is the dish. Everything else is sliced at a counter by somebody else. The salad is the only thing you make, it goes on both cut faces rather than in a layer in the middle, and its oil is what turns the crumb from bread into the wet, savory thing that holds the sandwich together. Under-dress it and you have a cold cut sandwich on a big roll.
What the brine actually did. USDA Farmers' Bulletin No. 1438, Making Fermented Pickles, 1924, states the mechanism plainly: vegetables placed in brine give up their juices and soluble material by osmosis, the sugar drawn out feeds lactic-acid bacteria, and the acid brine acts on the tissues to bring about the changes in color, taste and texture that mark the pickled state. It takes six weeks to two months for cucumbers. Its instruction for mixed pickles — onions, cauliflower, green peppers, tomatoes and beans — is one line long and it is the giardiniera rule: all vegetables should first be cured in brine. Cruess adds the olive half, where fermentation in a Seville cask runs one month in warm weather and three or longer in cool, and the flesh cures to the pit and turns sour. You are not fermenting anything on your counter. You are giving already-sour, already-salty things a day to trade oil and juice until the parsley tastes of olive and the olive tastes of fennel.
It wants curing, not freshness. The 1976 column calls the salad freshly made, and that is true of the chopping and false of the contents. Every solid in the jar arrived already cured. W. V. Cruess, writing Circular 278 for the University of California College of Agriculture in September 1924 after a trip through the olive districts of southern Europe, describes the pickle that is this salad's direct ancestor — olives crushed and sold in a vinegar brine flavored with garlic, peppers and spices — and records finding it common in Palermo and Messina in Sicily. He notes that such olives are dressed with sliced sweet peppers, garlic, fennel, whole pepper seed, whole mustard seed and bay leaves, and then stand several days before sale. Days, before the salad is sold, never mind eaten.
Pressing is mechanical, not decorative. Weight does three things at once: it drives the dressing out of the salad and into the crumb, it closes the air gaps between four slippery layers of cured meat so the stack cuts instead of sliding, and it takes an inch off the height of a sandwich nobody could otherwise get their mouth around. Two hours under a skillet does noticeably more than twenty minutes, and it is the reason this is a make-ahead sandwich rather than a fast one.
