“Eating a Muffuletta in Des Moines” by me
This isn’t a real post, not the way I think of the writing I’m doing in this space. It’s more an excuse to post some pictures of something and also talk about a poem I wrote a while back. I’ve got a real post in the works right now—it’ll go live in a couple of days I think—so I hope this will tide you over.
I guess it was 7-8 years or so ago that I ran into my friend Sandra Beasley at AWP, I want to say in DC. Might have been the last one I went to. No wait, I went to Tampa. Anyway, I just finished a reading with some other Arkansas grads and I see her and start chatting and she mentions this anthology she’s just starting to put together for the Southern Foodways Alliance and at the time I didn’t have any poems about food, southern or otherwise, but I had an idea.
I didn’t write the poem right away. I’ll get to that in a bit.
You know how when you grow up in a place and then you move and you try to get the food you grew up with somewhere else, somewhere that doesn’t share the same flavor language, that it just never tastes right? Even if you go to a restaurant run by people who grew up in the same place, unless you get there right when they first open, when they haven’t had to adjust the seasonings to match the palates of the people who will keep them open, it’s still not the same. The flavors drift.
And if you’re like me in that your people are mostly gone from where you called home, there’s not a lot of call to go back to visit. For example, I don’t have to try to master Caribbean food because we go back to south Florida to visit Amy’s parents and family every year. But I don’t have that kind of draw to Louisiana anymore, which means if I want home food I have to make it at home.
Some of it is easy. I can do red beans and rice anywhere. Same for gumbo, especially if I’m doing chicken and sausage instead of seafood.
Some of it is impossible. I’m never doing a crawfish boil up here in Iowa.
And some of it is work, which means that it happens for special occasions, defined here as “when I want to eat it bad enough.” As in today
.
Which takes me back to that idea I had when Sandra mentioned the anthology. There’s a little specialty grocery in my neighborhood that does pretty good food most of the time. They have an excellent bakery in the basement, and I worked there for a while, selling wine and beer. They also have a café and sell pre-made sandwiches and for one brief moment, they had something in there they called a muffuletta.
I am not exaggerating when I say the muffuletta is my favorite sandwich of all time. The only thing that comes close is a hot roast beef po-boy, dressed, from any gas station sandwich shop south of Baton Rouge, but still it’s the muffuletta.
And yes, I’ll admit that some of my love for this sandwich is emotional. I ate my first one at a formative period in my life and it was a bit of a treat because it’s kind of a pricy sandwich. It was a sign in my early teens that our family wasn’t struggling financially quite as much as we had been in the past. That meant we didn’t get them often.
And the same was true in my early adulthood. It was a special event, an I’m gonna treat myself kind of thing. What I didn’t appreciate was how fortunate I was to be able to treat myself easily when I had the means and desire. Because they were everywhere. Some places were better than others, obviously, but you could get a decent one at just about any local sandwich shop.
And then I moved to Arkansas to go to grad school. In a way it was easier to do without the food of my home because no one there was even trying it. There was an excellent New Orleans cuisine restaurant that opened up not long before I left and the food there was wonderful—I hugged the chef after our first meal there, no lie—but it was fancier food. (I just looked them up. Still open. If I ever drive through there I’ll probably drop in.)
And that was kind of the story everywhere else I lived. Either the food there tasted like what I knew through a local filter or it wasn’t day-to-day food. Like, I tried what Jason’s Deli calls a muffuletta one time and I couldn’t even finish it. It wasn’t bad really. It was just wrong. And the sandwich in that case at the local grocery was wrong too.
So I started making my own. I found recipes for the bread and I tried them and fiddled with them and got them right and found an Italian grocery that sells the meats and the olive dressing and I fiddled with those and got them right too and now when I feel the need, I tell Amy and Brittany (my eldest daughter) that there’s going to be a muffuletta day. Today was one of those days.
So I wrote a poem about it. But as you’ll see, the poem is only marginally about the sandwich.
Sandra took the poem for Vinegar and Char, even though when I sent it to her I fully expected she’d pass on it. And now my little poem sits there beside work from writers I’ve sat in awe of for literal decades. But even if she hadn’t taken it, I’d still be glad she encouraged me to write about that idea that had been sitting in my head for a while, unattended.
Sandra read the poem for Gravy, the Southern Foodways Alliance podcast a while back. You can listen to it here if you like.
Eating a Muffaletta in Des Moines
Don’t do it
even if you’ve never had one before
unless you come by my house
on a Sunday afternoon probably
in summer when I’m not teaching
because that’s when I’ll have time
I’m not saying I’m inviting you over. Just saying
that around here they’ll give you something
with olives and ham and Swiss on a
goddamn garlic focaccia,
quarter it, wrap it in plastic
and call it a muffaletta sandwich.
It’s probably got some Cajun seasoning
in there too because people not from
New Orleans who’ve maybe been to
New Orleans on vacation and think they know
New Orleans as a result call
New Orleans “Cajun country”
and put Tabasco on everything
and talk about how terrible Katrina was
and how drunk they got on Bourbon Street
that time at Mardi Gras
and if they yell “Hey la-bas!”
in front of me they might
just get knocked the fuck out
that’s all I’m saying
Garlic focaccia is a fine bread,
don’t get me wrong
but it’s not muffaletta.
It’s good for soaking up olive oil with
a little cracked pepper or balsamic.
I’m not a barbarian.
But a muffaletta needs crunch
in the crust, like you’re breaking
through years to get to the meat
and the olives and the pepper
and that bread better not be
falling apart like your first marriage
did after her crying confession
on I-12 West that she was cheating
and her name was Alexis and you said
what like from Dynasty? and the leaky AC
dripped ice-cold condensation all over
your right foot and you were glad
it was over even tho it took
a year for it to be over-over
and you had to cover court costs with
an unsubsidized student loan check
that you’re still paying on to this day.
No soggy first marriage bread is what
I’m saying. Second marriage bread,
sturdy, takes-no-shit-from-you bread,
tells the salami and ham and provolone
and most of all that giardinera
(spicy for me but I’ll take it easy on you)
to know their place
in the goddamn universe.
You can’t get that bread here.
You really can’t get it anywhere
but in New Orleans because
it’s not the kind of loaf you can use
for anything else, and who needs
a sandwich like this more than
a couple three times a year?
You’d die if you ate it more
than that. So somebody visits
New Orleans and wanders out
of Central Grocery with one
and needs it a year later
and there’s no bread to make it
so they wind up with this bullshit
soggy soft bread with some mortadella
and boiled ham and baby Swiss and a handful
of pimento-stuffed manzanilla olives
and goddamn it no one should live like that.
Come by my house. I’ll make the bread.
So tell me about the foods you miss, or the food you make for yourself because nobody else near you can do it right, or even just the food that says home to you. Who’s ready to eat?
Another Poem to Love 