Cooking in Maximum Security
I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller Enshittification: catch me next in Toronto, San Diego and Seattle! Full schedule here.
Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons:
https://halfletterpress.com/cooking-in-maximum-security/
Cooking in Maximum Security has a new English translation from Half Letter Press, who also publish the classic Prisoners' Inventions, which is one of my favorite books of all time, a collection of keenly observed, beautifully drawn material improvisations from America's prisons:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/09/king-rat/#mother-of-invention
Prison cookbooks are a genre unto themselves, with "underground" classics like Jailhouse Cookbook:
http://jailhousecookbook.com/
And slick coffee-table books like Prison Ramen:
https://www.eater.com/23900359/gastropod-instant-ramen-prison-ramen-recipes-stories-maruchan-cup-noodle
But Cooking in Maximum Security drills down much deeper on the method than those other books, elevating the makerish improvisation of the chefs whose work it reproduces. They explain how to make an oven out of a wooden stool lined with cigarette foil and draped with heavy blankets, into which a small gas burner is introduced:
https://www.cookinginmaximumsecurity.com/tools/
Or how to turn a toothbrush handle and the razor blade from a pencil-sharpener into an all-purpose paring knife:
https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-l4sjfhdy/images/stencil/2048×2048/products/771/3042/CookinginMax4__83959.1762438870.jpg?c=2
These field-expedient gadget improvisations are incredibly satisfying. They have the vibe of a good episode of Scrapheap Challenge, or the high-stakes duct-tape ingenuity of Apollo 13. And while these recipes and build notes were collected in the 2010s, the pencil/charcoal illustrations have a classic 1970s feel, like the illustrations out of the Moosewood Cookbook or The Joy of Sex. If you love the kind of clever repurposings that filled the pages of Make magazine, you'll love this.
Plus, the food sounds incredible. Mouth-watering. Fresh bread whose dough was warmed and risen by setting it atop the heat-radiating surface of a CRT television!
One thing that sets Cooking in Maximum Security apart from other prison cookbooks is the unique character of Italian maximum security prisons, in which visitors are allowed to bring a fairly large variety of goods to inmates, and where the commissary is stocked with an incredible variety of basic ingredients, including things like goat and beef livers (the book reproduces an entire commissary menu, with prices, as an appendix). Prisoners have access to beer and wine, and find endless uses for old beer cans. The book also drops in casual clues about life in an Italian prison, for example, when it suggests getting your wooden stirrer by taking down a crucifix and using that.