Best Food Writing 2014 (57 page)

Kosmulski: “Take ramen noodles, boil it down to literally mush. You ball it up, put a piece of cheese and beef sausage in the middle. Make sure it's tightly wound up. You cook it in the microwave for ten minutes until it's brown.”

Peoples: “It's not actually a chicken nugget. It's the idea. It's only in your mind. If you ain't had a chicken nugget in a while, and it's in the shape of a chicken nugget, it'll remind you of a chicken nugget.”

It's commissary day at dorm A-3, and four inmates gather in the microwave alcove. They've pooled their resources, each buying specific ingredients, and for the last two hours they have collaborated on a food project. Ingredients are organized with precision like mise en place at a fine restaurant.

The chef de cuisine is Mike McClellan, who's earned the reputation as the Thomas Keller of cellblock A-3. McClellan, a soft-spoken forty-four-year-old man sentenced through 2017 for stalking, says Westville is the therapeutic community he needs to turn his life around. Having earned his associate's and bachelor's degrees, he's now at work on his master's. McClellan says he has two passions in life: Jesus Christ and cooking.

Pastor Mike, as he's known, spearheads two recipes today: tortellini and chicken Florentine soup. I try a sip of the latter, made from pouch chicken, garlic powder, ramen soup mix, powdered coffee creamer, and dried Thai rice noodles. It tastes as you might expect—one step above emergency-packet soup reconstituted with hot water.

I offer: “That's pretty good.”

Pastor Mike corrects me: “No, that's excellent.”

With tortellini, his attention to detail is even more impressive. Pastor Mike takes pizza dough from a Chef Boyardee pizza kit and simmers it in water for three minutes in a microwave. He lays out the cooked squares of pasta. Pastor Mike creates the filling by dicing pepperoni and pepper jack cheese with the lid of a tin can. He hovers over his ingredients the way a molecular gastronomist hunches with tweezers.

He microwaves the filling with tomato pizza sauce and powdered creamer until it turns into a paste, which he encloses in dough and
cooks once more in hot water. The finished product comes out as rustic crescents of dumpling, a nod to Pastor Mike's Italian heritage. For a moment the four cooks shed their prison wear and are dining at a fancy Italian restaurant. They eat like free men. Two hours toiling for a brief transportive respite from this forsaken place.

There's a secondary market for these kinds of prepared foods. Down the hall in dorm A-3, three inmates sit around a metal bench strewn with candy. Their setup is a complicated assembly line involving a microwave, plastic bowls, a container filled with ice water, popsicle sticks, and parchment paper. It looks like a home chemistry kit.

The three have spent the last few hours making lollipops at a pace of one every five minutes. They'll spend the next few hours making lollipops, until their candy stash runs out.

The head chef is John Hopkins, whose goatee and thick glasses makes him resemble Walter White circa Season 3
Breaking Bad
. Seated next to him is Frederick Betts, Jr. who incredibly, is a dead ringer for Jesse Pinkman circa Season 4
Breaking Bad
.

Hopkins learned the lollipop trade from a fellow inmate, and since that inmate's release, Hopkins has taken over as resident candy expert. He estimates he's cooked up six hundred-plus lollipops, and has mastered all the subtleties of the art.

He explains that different confectionaries have different melting points, depending on whether they are made of corn syrup or sugar. So they need to be cooked on a staggered schedule, with butterscotch discs going in the microwave first, followed by Jolly Ranchers, and Now And Laters last, which only need ten seconds to soften.

The mixture comes out of the microwave bubbling, which Hopkins immediately whips with a popsicle stick. At a precise moment, he dunks the bowl into an ice bath, which releases the hardening goo from its container. He wraps this with parchment paper and molds the lollipop by hand around the popsicle stick.

“Some guys, they make it flat and round, but it don't fit in the mouth that well,” Hopkins says. “We make it into an egg shape. We say, ‘customer friendly.'”

The base of the popsicle stick is marked with a letter. L is lemon drop. B is butterscotch. G is grape. I can already see these in a Brooklyn boutique, labeled PENAL SUCKERS and sold for $4 a pop.

I ask John: “What are you in Westville for?”

“Manufacturing meth.”

Ron Edwards, 62, has worked within every aspect of the restaurant industry, from running the front-of-house at fine-dining establishments to owning his own place. Now, he teaches culinary arts to fourteen of the luckiest inmates at Westville.

Lucky, because students taste what they cook. When the alternative is goulash, chicken parmigiana is Christmas arriving twice a week.

Those accepted into the twelve-week cooking program are screened by case managers for past behavior and future potential, which is why Edwards has never had a problem giving inmates access to sharp implements. Completing the program has major incentives, too—graduates get three months knocked off their sentences. The waiting list for this class is around half a year.

We arrive for a luncheon cooked entirely by Edwards' students. Today's guests are a mostly female group who handle crisis management in the event a prison riot breaks out. The dining space is elegant in a way a mock restaurant at a high school home-economics program would be—adorned almost entirely in blue, decorated with portraits of inmates dressed in chef's whites.

A man with tattoos for sleeves brings out a starter course of shrimp cocktail. Shrimp cocktail! He does everything expected of a server at a white-tablecloth restaurant—walks through the dining room with erect posture, picks up silverware without a clank, and responds to your thank yous with, “You are very welcome.” After the cocktail comes cream of broccoli soup and chef's salad with chopped ham. For the entrée: roast pork and gravy alongside mashed potatoes and “Hoosier beans,” which are green beans with sautéed bacon and onions. Dessert is cheesecake with blackberries.

“Someone at the local newspaper recently asked for one of the inmates' recipes. It's the first time they're in the paper for something good, and not in the crime blotter,” Edwards says. “The class is about teaching them the basic things about life. They don't have a lot of confidence. We try to instill that.”

After the luncheon guests depart, the cooks and servers sit in the blue room to feast on their efforts. They eat their massive portions in
silent preoccupation. If you remember that scene in
The Shawshank Redemption
where an exclusive group of inmates enjoy an ultra-rare treat of cold beers on the rooftop, you'll have a sense for the joy of these Westville men.

I ask them about what it means to lose the freedom to eat what they choose, and they begin to reminisce wistfully. Adam McDonald brings up his grandmother, who made him appreciate food at age ten when she taught him to cook steaks and grilled cheese sandwiches. He worked at several fast-food chains before getting sent to Westville for burglary. When he's released in six months, McDonald says he'd like to cook in a fine-dining restaurant.

“In a prison system, there are times you look around and you don't feel like anything,” McDonald says. “To eat off of glass dishes and metal forks instead of plastic bowls and spoons . . . I've been in a better mood since I started this class.”

While serving a thirteen-year sentence for cocaine possession, Jauston Huerta became a published author—writing a children's book called
Micheliana & the Monster Treats
. It's about a dragon that attacks a village, and the young princess who hatches a plan to feed the dragon to stop its rampage.

Huerta says, “Next to my family, food is a definite component that's a constant reminder my freedom has been taken. Because I have to eat something I don't want to eat. It causes you to really appreciate your freedom and what you left behind out there.”

A kitchen worker walks by with a platter filled with shrimp cocktail.

Huerta's eyes follow. “That's the point. That's the point.”

Says McDonald: “ . . . to feel human again.”

I
n January 1985, Pizza Hut aired a commercial in South Carolina that featured a condemned prisoner ordering delivery for his last meal. Two weeks earlier, the state had carried out its first execution in twenty-two years, electrocuting a man named Joseph Carl Shaw. Shaw's last-meal request had been pizza, although not from Pizza Hut. Complaints came quickly; the spot was pulled, and a company official claimed the ad was never intended to run in South Carolina.

It's not hard to understand why Pizza Hut's creative team thought the ad was a good idea. The last meal offers an irresistible blend of food, death, and crime that drives a commercial and voyeuristic cottage industry. Studiofeast, an invitation-only supper club in New York City, hosts an annual event based on the best responses to the question, “You're about to die, what's your last meal?” There are books and magazine articles and art projects that address, among other things, what celebrity chefs—like Mario Batali and Marcus Samuelsson—would have for their last meals, or what the famous and the infamous ate before dying. Newspapers reported that Saddam Hussein was offered but refused chicken, while
Esquire
published an article about the terminally ill François Mitterrand, the former French president, who had Marennes oysters, foie gras, and, the
pièce
de résistance
, two ortolan songbirds. The bird is thought to represent the French soul and, because it's protected, is illegal to consume.

While the number of yearly executions in the United States has generally declined since a high of ninety-eight in 1999, the website Dead Man Eating tracked and commented on last-meal requests of death-row inmates across the country during the first decade of the new millennium. One of the site's last posts, in January 2010, was the request of Bobby Wayne Woods, who was executed in Texas for raping and killing an eleven-year-old girl: “Two chicken-fried steaks, two fried chicken breasts, three fried pork chops, two hamburgers with lettuce, tomato, onion, and salad dressing, four slices of bread, half a pound of fried potatoes with onion, half a pound of onion rings with ketchup, half a pan of chocolate cake with icing, and two pitchers of milk.”

There are also efforts to leverage the pop-culture spectacle of last meals to protest the death penalty. An Oregon artist has vowed to paint images of fifty last-meal requests of U.S. inmates on ceramic plates every year until the death penalty is outlawed. Amnesty International launched an anti–capital punishment campaign this past February that featured depictions of the last meals of prisoners who were later exonerated of their crimes.

No matter your stance on capital punishment, eating and dying are universal and densely symbolic human processes. Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country. If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly). And when this combination of factors is set against America's already fraught relationship with food, supersized or slow, and with weight and weight loss, it's almost surprising that Pizza Hut didn't have a winner on its hands.

The idea of a meal before an execution is compassionate or perverse, depending on your perspective, but it contains an inherently curious paradox: marking the end of a life with the stuff that sustains
it seems at once laden with meaning and beside the point. As Barry Lee Fairchild, who was executed by the state of Arkansas in 1995, said in regard to his last meal, “It's just like putting gas in a car that don't have no motor.”