Pam Cannatella attacks the task at hand with military precision.
Six sesame seed-topped muffuletta loaves sit on a baking pan in the prep kitchen of Cannatella Grocery in Mid City, ready to be sliced open and transformed into one of the menu’s—and Louisiana’s—signature sandwiches.
Meticulously portioned piles of sliced meats and cheeses lie within arm’s reach, as does the tabletop aluminum bin of olive salad that gives the sandwich its salty tang.
Cannatella Grocery first opened in 1923 in St. Landry Parish, but only started serving muffulettas after Pam and her husband, Grant, returned to Louisiana from Georgia to run the family business more than 20 years ago.
It being an Italian grocery, Grant wanted to add a muffuletta to the menu, so he endeavored to make fresh round loaves and bottle his own olive salad, Pam says. The sandwich was a big hit, drawing fans from throughout Acadiana, particularly after it was featured on a Lafayette television station.
The Cannatellas opened a Baton Rouge location in 2019, giving local muffuletta connoisseurs a new source.
The muffaletta’s origins are largely credited to Central Grocery in New Orleans. In the early 20th century, its late owner Salvatore Lupo spontaneously tucked the individual meats, cheeses and olive salad popular with his Italian immigrant customers inside a Sicilian muffuletta loaf. A lack of tables, his descendants have said, inspired the shift to a lunch dish that was both convenient and portable.
Cannatella’s version of the muffuletta demonstrates how foodways in the Bayou State meander and evolve—including whether the sandwich is better served hot or cold.
“The original is served cold, and that’s the way we’d always made them,” Pam says. “But when we moved to Baton Rouge, people kept asking for them hot, so I went out and bought a press. Now we sell about 90% of them hot.”
Cannatella’s muffuletta loaves are made from scratch daily at its original location in the town of Melville, now used as the business’ commissary kitchen. Pam Cannatella brings the bread to Baton Rouge every morning. Both halves get a zhuzh of olive oil from a squirt bottle to keep them moist and flavorful.
Cannatella’s house olive salad, which the company bottles, features extra-virgin olive oil rather than brine and a blend of chopped giardiniera and green and black olives. A scoop of olive salad goes down first, straying from Central Grocery’s formula, which places
it last.
Meat, cheese, meat, cheese, meat. Onto the split loaf go spirals of Genoa salami, followed by provolone, mortadella, Swiss cheese and, finally, ham.
A small amount of olive salad is the final flourish on top. “It’s what we call ‘dirtying it up,’” Cannatella says.
Learn more about the decades-long legacy of Anthony’s Italian Deli, also in Mid City, in 225’s Between the Lines video series.
This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue of 225 Magazine.
