Rhode Islanders are in the minority that say grinder. Here's the story behind the sandwich

What are some of the words you might use to refer to a long sandwich that contains cold cuts, lettuce and other toppings?

You might call it a sub. That was the most popular response in the 2003 Harvard Dialect Study in which 10,708 people responded in an effort to map dialect. Taking 77% of the vote, sub was used pretty broadly throughout the country.

If you’re from the Philadelphia area, you might have answered a hoagie, which took 6.98% of the vote. Move just a little way up the coastline to New York City and hero emerges as the dominant term, with 5.8% of the vote.

There’s bomber near Chicago, po’ boy in the South. But, as Rhode Islanders and many New Englanders know, there’s another word: grinder. Or, as it's more commonly pronounced, "grindah." Who needs the letter "r"?

Having received many questions about where the term grinder is used and the origin of the term, we thought it was time to find out the answers.

Where is a sandwich called a grinder?

Based on the data from the Harvard Dialect study, grinder is used primarily in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont.

A similar study that included the primary researcher on the Harvard Dialect Study, but was done via an internet survey from 2004 to 2006 with about 3,000 respondents, found the term was in use all over New England and even in parts of Wisconsin.

Google Trends is a tool that looks at search history data and can break it down by region. Grinder is too broad of a term to look at, but “Italian Grinder” is very much a Rhode Island search term. It has a search interest of 100 in Rhode Island, according to Google, compared with 19 in Connecticut, 11 in Massachusetts and 0 in every other New England state.

But if you make the search term “grinder sandwich” — which, it's worth noting, went viral on TikTok in the past year — Connecticut has a slightly higher search interest than Rhode Island. Some Southern states such as Mississippi have an even higher interest, as people in those states discovered the grinder for the first time after it went viral. If you take a longer timeline than a year to account for the trend, Connecticut still is the most frequent searcher of “grinder sandwich,” followed by Rhode Island, and then Massachusetts.

What’s the origin of the term grinder?

There’s a belief that the grinder was invented in New London, Connecticut.

Here’s the case for it. There’s an oral history, which has made its way into newspaper articles and a short, locally produced documentary called “Grinder is King,” that Benny Capalbo invented the grinder. An immigrant from Italy, he opened the shop New York Fruit Market in 1914, and by 1926 he was making his first sandwich grinders. They grew quickly in popularity, and then he landed a contract with the local Navy base and started selling hundreds a day. The shop was eventually taken over by Anthony Ferrante.

Barbara Neff, who was behind the "Grinder is King" documentary, said in an email she was told he picked the name grinder because “you grind your teeth on the hard Italian bread.”

This story has been told in newspapers, blogs, magazines and in a book.

But it is worth noting that the story isn’t 100% verifiable. The New London County Historical Society took a look through their archives for this story and couldn’t find a Benny Capalbo, but they did find “a Benedetto Capaldo (or sometimes Cappaldo) who ran a grocery store,” Pat Schaefer, of the Historical Society, wrote in an email. The store is listed as opening in 1919, and, she said, he’s not listed in the documents they looked at as the owner of the New York Fruit Store.

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There’s also a belief — separate from the New London story — that the sandwiches were named grinders because the Italian-American dockworkers who so often purchased them were “grinders,” a slang term for the workers because many of them worked grinding the hulls of the ship. The names became linked. 

Peter Kammerer, owner of The Sandwich Hut in Providence, said he's heard about the dock worker mythology and the grinding of the teeth, but he's also heard a third option: that it's because all of the meats in the sandwich are different types of ground meat.

That leaves us, to some extent, in the weeds. Because what does seem to be undoubtedly true is that grinders were very popular in New London, and the city's overall claim as the birthplace of the grinder feels probable. At the very least, it was influential in popularizing the term.

Interestingly, Schaefer said this about the spelling of the last name: “There are apparently a lot of Capalbos in Westerly, but not New London.”

That, as well as general proximity, might offer a clue as to how the name traveled to Rhode Island.

What makes a sandwich a grinder?

To be clear, not every sandwich in Rhode Island is a grinder.

"It's a sandwich made with Italian cold cuts, pickles and other vegetables put on a grinder roll," Kammerer said. "There are a lot of different mixtures of salumi, but they're all Italian cold cuts."

He notes that they have several different types of grinders on the menu. Grinder rolls, he noted, can be used for other sandwiches, such as meatball, but that doesn't necessarily make that sandwich a grinder.

His definition lines up with the ingredient list Neff but forward of “olive oil, salami, provolone cheese, tomatoes, salt and pepper, and lettuce on Italian bread.”

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What and Why RI is a weekly feature by The Providence Journal to explore our readers' curiosity. If you have a question about Rhode Island, big or small, email it to klandeck@gannett.com. She loves a good question.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Why call a sandwich a grinder in RI? The origin story of the grinder