Between the Bread

The last time my friend Jonas jetted back from New Orleans, he brought the best possible gift: a jar of olive salad from muffuletta mecca the Central Grocery. Andrew polished it off in this weekend improv sandwich. An otherwise unassuming turkey and provolone gets a quick and Big Easy update with a healthy serving of olive salad. Add some butter lettuce and fresh sprouts on a Trader Joe's wheat bun, and you've got a sammie that would make a muffuletta proud.

That sandwich pictured at the top of my blog? Why, it's only one of the most delicious sandwiches ever: the muffuletta from Central Grocery in New Orleans. Enough people have asked me about it that I figure it's time for a little 'letta lesson.

Invented by a Sicilian grocer in New Orleans around 1906, the muffuletta (pronounced moofalottah or moofalettah, depending on who you ask) contains an antipasto platter's worth of genoa salami, Italian ham, mortadella, swiss and/or provolone cheese, and a hefty scoop of olive salad, all served on a sesame-seeded roll also called a muffuletta and about the size of a Frisbee. Though no one is quite sure who invented it, Central Grocery in the French Quarter stakes the claim, and most people accept that.

A half sandwich will handily feed two people; my family of four used to order a whole one to eat on the Moonwalk by the Mississippi River. It's one of my favorite sandwiches ever and definitely one of my most sentimental. The most magical thing about a muffuletta is that, unlike most sandwiches, it actually improves over time. Here's how.