Recipes & Lore • Bakery Counter Canon

Italian Pepper Biscuits

Name: Rhode Island Italian Pepper Biscuits
Prep time: 25 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 55 min
Yield: About 24 biscuits
Cuisine: Italian-American (Rhode Island)
Ingredients: 3 cups all-purpose flour; 1 tablespoon baking powder; 1 1/4 teaspoons salt; 2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper; 1 teaspoon fennel seeds (optional but traditional); 1/2 cup olive oil; 3/4 cup dry white wine (or water)

In most of America a "biscuit" is soft and buttered. In a Rhode Island Italian bakery, a pepper biscuit is a hard, crunchy, savory ring loaded with coarse black pepper — closer to a rustic cracker than to anything served with gravy. They're sold by the bag next to the register, eaten with wine, cheese, and antipasto, and stashed in pantries across the state the way other places stash pretzels. Like pizza strips, they're a food you don't realize is regional until you move away and can't find them.

Rhode Island Italian pepper biscuits, knotted and golden. — Photo: TravelAwaits

You need

3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1¼ tsp salt
2 tsp coarsely ground black pepper — coarse, and don't be shy
1 tsp fennel seeds (optional but traditional)
½ cup olive oil
¾ cup dry white wine (or water — but the wine is doing something)

Method

Heat the oven to 350°F. Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt, pepper, and fennel.
Stir in the oil and wine until a firm dough forms, then knead a minute or two until smooth.
Pinch off walnut-sized pieces, roll each into a 5-inch rope, and press the ends together into a ring. Uniformity is for factories.
Bake on parchment 25–30 minutes, until golden and dry all the way through. The test: a proper pepper biscuit snaps. If it bends, it goes back in.
Cool completely and store airtight. They keep for weeks — durability is a feature, not an accident. Serve with sharp provolone, soppressata, olives, and something red in a glass.

The lore: Rhode Island has, by percentage, the largest Italian-American population of any state, and the pepper biscuit is one of the clearest surviving links to the old country — a first cousin of the taralli of southern Italy, carried over and kept in production by the state's century-old family bakeries. D. Palmieri's Bakery has been run by the same family since it opened in Providence in 1905; Scialo Bros. Bakery has held its corner of Federal Hill since 1916. Every Rhode Island family that buys them is loyal to one bakery's version and politely suspicious of the others. The sweet sibling — the glossy, purple-tinted wine biscuit — shares the shelf, the shape, and the argument. This is our home version; the bakeries' exact recipes stay behind the counter, where they belong.

Sources & further reading

Send the bakery shelf

Pepper biscuits actually do survive the mail — sealed bakery snacks like these are exactly the kind of local find we pack into the Rhode Island Survival Kit.

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