North America · Volume 32, The Prairie and the Port
Muffuletta
French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana
Illustration
As tradition built it
Muffuletta
Central Grocery, founded 1906
Ingredients
The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.
Sandwich
- round, sesame-crusted loaf
- mortadella
- salami
- ham
- provolone, sliced
- Swiss cheese, sliced
Olive salad
Method
- Central Grocery was founded in 1906 by Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian immigrant, on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, moving to its present address and adopting its current name in 1919.
- Split a round, sesame-crusted loaf and layer with mortadella, salami and ham, and sheets of provolone and Swiss cheese.
- Bind with a chopped olive salad of green and black olives, celery, cauliflower, carrot, pepperoncini, garlic and olive oil.
Notes
The generally repeated origin story, that Lupo served Sicilian dockworkers and market labourers who had been buying sliced meats, cheese, olives and pickled vegetables alongside a round muffuletta loaf and eating the components separately, and that his innovation was simply combining them into one sandwich, comes from general audience sources rather than an archival one, and it is a plausible, widely repeated story.
Lupo ran the store until 1946, when his son-in-law took over; the business remains family owned today, rebuilt after 2021 hurricane damage and reopened in December 2024.
What a modern chef changes
A vacuum-cured olive salad and a proper press
Method
- Cure the olive salad's own vegetables briefly under vacuum before chopping, a controlled version of the traditional overnight marinating that gives more even penetration in less time.
- Dehydrate a portion of the olive salad's celery and carrot, grinding it into a concentrated seasoning dust folded back through the fresh salad for a deeper savoury note without further diluting the mixture with more oil.
- Press the assembled sandwich briefly and evenly, a genuine technical step the traditional version, built to be eaten immediately from the counter, was never designed around, letting the layers properly marry before slicing.