L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 24 L'Italo-Americano O n D e c a t u r Street, in the o l d F r e n c h Q u a r t e r o f New Orleans, a line still forms most days at a narrow, tile-floored grocery for a sandwich roughly the size of a dinner plate. It is a r o u n d l o a f c r u s t e d w i t h s e s a m e , s p l i t a n d l a y e r e d with mortadella, salami and ham, sheets of provolone and S w i s s c h e e s e , a n d b o u n d together by a cool, briny, gar- licky tangle of chopped olives and pickled vegetables. They call it the muffuletta, and along with gumbo and the beignet, it is one of the things people like to eat when they are in New Orleans. What many of them may not real- ize, however, is that they are tasting a piece of Sicily when biting in. The grocery is Central Grocery, which traces its history to 1906, when the young Sicilian Salvatore Lupo and a partner opened a shop on Decatur Street; they moved to the present address and gave the store the name it still carries in 1919. Lupo was one of an extraordinary tide of people: between 1884 and 1924, more than a quar- ter of a million Italian immi- grants passed through the p o r t o f N e w O r l e a n s , t h e great majority of the city's n e w c o m e r s c o m i n g f r o m Sicily, and enough of them settled in the lower French Q u a r t e r t h a t i t b e c a m e known as Little Palermo, its air thick with garlic and baking bread, and Sicilian spoken more freely than Eng- lish. Many had come with the citrus trade, on the boats that carried lemons and oranges up from the Mediterranean, and they stayed to work the docks and the great open-air French Market a few steps from Lupo's door. Grocers and bakeries like his became the pantries of that commu- nity, stocking the salami and t h e o l i v e s a n d t h e r o u n d loaves of home. The sandwich was really born of watching those men eat, because the Sicilian ven- dors and laborers who came through the market bought their lunch from Lupo the old-country way, that is, as separate things: a length of b r e a d , a w e d g e o f c h e e s e , s o m e s a l a m i , a s c o o p o f olives, then sat balancing it all on their knees and on the barrelheads, a plate in one hand and a hunk of bread in the other. Lupo, the story goes, took pity on the jug- gling and made a suggestion: why not put the whole lunch inside the bread and be done with it? So, he split one of the round loaves he sold, p i l e d i n t h e m e a t s , t h e cheese, and the olive salad, and handed over the first muffuletta. E v e n t h e n a m e c a m e straight off the boat, for in Palermo and parts of west- ern Sicily "muffuletta" is a p a r t i c u l a r t y p e o f b r e a d topped with sesame, tradi- tionally tied to the early- November commemoration of the dead. Back home, the s a m e l o a f i s o f t e n e a t e n cunzata, "dressed" (which comes from the Sicilian verb "cunzari," to season) split and anointed with olive oil and oregano, a little cheese, sometimes anchovy or toma- to – a close relation of the p a n e c u n z a t o o f w e s t e r n Sicily that many of our read- ers will know from their own g r a n d p a r e n t s ' k i t c h e n s . Lupo, then, did not create the sandwich from nothing; he just combined a loaf with t h e m e a t s , c h e e s e s , a n d dressed olives his Sicilian customers already ate, both at home and in New Orleans, giving it a slightly different twist. W h e n i t c o m e s t o i t s ingredients, the shinier star is perhaps the olive salad, a generally chopped, marinat- e d m i x t u r e o f o l i v e s a n d pickled giardiniera veg- etables, with garlic, herbs, and good olive oil. Some ver- sions add capers, celery, car- rot, or cauliflower, all left to sit until the flavors mix well together. Spread thickly on the bottom crust, it soaks up slowly into the bread and l i f t s t h e m u f f u l e t t a c l e a r above many other cold-cut sandwiches because you get so many flavors and textures in just one bite: the brine, t h e g a r l i c , t h e o i l , t h e Mediterranean feel, all in a single spoonful. Because we must be honest here: a muf- f u l e t t a w i t h o u t a p r o p e r olive salad is just a sand- wich; with it, it becomes a small monument to Mediter- ranean beauty! At Central Grocery, the muffuletta is still served the traditional way, unheated and l eft to r est so the oil works down into the crumb, and the purists will tell you that heating it, the way some newer places do, pressing it warm until the provolone runs, makes a fine sandwich but not, strictly speaking, a muffuletta. I n d e e d , t h e m u f f u l e t t a spread outward from Lupo's g r o c e r y c o u n t e r u n t i l i t belonged to the whole city and became a bit of a local symbol of pride and belong- ing: New Orleans took the muffuletta to heart, argued endlessly over who made the best one, and served it up as one of its own native glories, right alongside dishes born of France and Africa, or the C a r i b b e a n . I t b e c a m e s o thoroughly a symbol of the place that most people came to assume it had always been there, a thing of the bayou and the brass band, forget- ting the Sicilian grocer alto- gether. C e n t r a l G r o c e r y s t i l l s t a n d s o n D e c a t u r S t r e e t t o d a y , a n d s t i l l s e l l s t h e sandwich it invented more than a century ago, wrapped in paper and cut into halves and quarters heavy enough to feed a family. Behind that counter and in a hundred kitchens across the South, the recipe has been passed, more or less intact, from a grandma to a grandchild, the way a dialect or a saint's day passes down, with love and a h i n t o f t h e o l d c o u n t r y inside. This is why the muffuletta is so quintessentially New Orleanian and, at the same time, so Sicilian: food is one of the easiest things to carry w i t h y o u w h e n y o u l e a v e h o m e f o r g o o d . I t b r i n g s back memories, certainly, but it also helps create new ones in a new home. Nothing embodies that better than the muffuletta. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI The Muffuletta: the Sicilian roots of a New Orleans classic HERITAGE HISTORY IDENTITY TRADITIONS A freshly made muffuletta shows the layers of cured meats, cheeses and olive salad that turned a Sicilian-style loaf into one of New Orleans' best-known sand- wiches (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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