Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March 12, 2007 Muffuletta A well-made muffuletta is one of the world's best sandwiches, a New Orleans original, and a perfect lunch for a meeting that needs its brains cleared. (As long as everyobody is eating it, anyway.) If you go to Italy and have a "panino" anywhere, you'll see the roots of the muffuletta. The bread is always crusty. . . there's always fresh cheese. . . the meats are assertive. . . and olive oil is the universal dressing. But you won't find muffulettas in Italy. (At least, I haven't, and nobody there knows the word.) It's a fascinating battle between elements with powerful flavors (salami, garlic, olives) and those with mellow, moderating flavors (cheese, olive oil, and crusty bread. The tussle takes place while the ham stands there, watching. If the forces are evenly matched--as they should be--your palate wins the skirmish. A muffuletta in which garlic, herbs, saltiness, or muskiness takes over is not a good muffuletta. Neither is one that tastes like a glorified ham and cheese sandwich. The flavors build on one another into a crescendo. You shouldn't be immediately able to pick out any one flavor--unless you happen to get a bite with a really big chunk of olive. The history of the muffuletta is clouded. We know that it was developed by first-generation New Orleans Italians, probably in a grocery store in the French Quarter. The word "muffuletta" is a Sicilian dialect word for the kind of bread used to make the sandwich. (Every time I write for a national magazine and drop the word "muffuletta" in the copy, I get frantic calls from the fact-checkers. They can never find any reference to the word, even in Italian-language sources.) The Central Grocery claims to have created the sandwich, but there are too many other stories out there to take this as gospel. The muffuletta is beset with two vexing problems these days. The first is the temporary (we hope) absence of the United Bakery from the scene. That old maker of the best Italian-style breads, including the definitive muffuletta loaf, was sidelined by the hurricane. The sandwich hasn't been the same since. The other issue is the determination of a lot of sandwich shops to heat their muffulettas. Even tho ones that don't heat their poor boys (which they always should.) Everything in a muffuletta, with the possible exception of the bread, tastes best at room temperature. A muffuletta heated long enough to melt the cheese (the typical hot muffuletta) turns the tide of its internal flavor battle to the olive salad end of the spectrum. Meanwhile, the salami has a nervous breakdown and becomes slimy and disagreeable. The nutty flavors that keep the cheese balanced (assuming decent cheese has been used) get overwhelmed by the cheese's own fat. The interior of the bread changes and softens when a muffuletta is heated. Its structure collapses, and you have that ball-of-dough effect. Yuck. I can accept a muffuletta that's shoved into the oven for a few seconds after being made--just enough to lightly toast the exterior of the bread. But the heat should not penetrate to where the meats and cheeses are. If that sounds overly traditional, listen to this next proposal. I think that muffulettas would benefit from innovation. Who's to say that only the combination of ham, salami, mortadella, provolone, mozzarella, Swiss cheese, and olive salad is acceptable? For some years, the old Progress Grocery made a few eccentric but wonderful muffulettas that swapped out many of those ingredients for other things. I wonder why the talented chefs of our town haven't seized on the basic muffuletta idea and played around with it? They've done it to all the other local classics. Cafe Giovanni's Chef Duke LoCicero came up with a muffuletta using buffalo-milk mozzarella and duck pastrami, but that's as far as anyone got with it. A few sandwich shops have managed to create one new variant: the seafood muffuletta. But these tend to be standard seafood loaves served on a muffuletta bread, usually without olive salad or anything like it. © 2007 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com