On Decatur Street, in the old French Quarter of 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 round loaf crusted with sesame, split and layered with mortadella, salami and ham, sheets of provolone and Swiss cheese, and bound together by a cool, briny, garlicky 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 realize, however, is that they are tasting a piece of Sicily when biting in.
