Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  There’s no actual chicken in the prison chicken nugget recipe, but commissary connoisseurs still manage to re-create the dish as a placebo food. Two inmates named Jan Kosmulski and Troy Peoples explain:

  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.”

  LAST MEALS

  By Brent Cunningham

  From Lapham’s Quarterly

  Journalist Brent Cunningham, who is deputy editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, keeps us honest with his determination to buck the trends, to tell the stories that aren’t being told—in this case, on Death Row.

  In 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.”

  On January 14, 1772, in Frankfurt am Main, Susanna Margarethe Brandt prepared for her execution—she had killed her infant daughter—by sitting down to a sprawling feast with six local officials and judges. The ritual was known as the Hangman’s Meal. On the menu that day were “three pounds of fried sausages, ten pounds of beef, six pounds of baked carp, twelve pounds of larded roast veal, soup, cabbage, bread, a sweet, and eight and a half measures of 1748 wine.” Had she committed the crime in neighboring Bavaria, Brandt likely would have preceded the meal with a morning drink in her cell with the man who would later decapitate her with a sword. This shared aperitif was called St. John’s Blessing, after John the Baptist, who is said to have forgiven those who were about to behead him.

  Brandt, who was twenty-five years old and is supposed to have inspired Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s character Gretchen in Faust, reportedly managed nothing more than a glass of water. Her companions in the repast fared little better.

  The origins of the last-meal ritual aren’t settled. Although the earliest record of the death penalty is the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu in the twenty-second century BC, some scholars suggest the last meal may have begun in ancient Greece, and in Rome gladiators were fed a sumptuous last meal, the coena libera, the night before their date in the Colosseum. In eighteenth-century London, favored or better-off prisoners were allowed a party with food and drink and outside guests on the night before they were hanged. The next day, as the prisoner traveled the three miles from Newgate Prison to the gallows at Tyburn Fair, the procession would stop at a pub for the condemned’s customary “great bowl of ale to drink at their pleasure, as their last refreshment in life.” (England’s noble or highborn criminals, such as Anne Boleyn and the earl of Essex, were beheaded elsewhere, often at the Tower of London; Walter Raleigh reportedly took a last smoke from his tobacco pipe before he lost his head in Old Palace Yard at Westminster.) In the New World, the Aztecs feasted some of those who were tapped for ritual sacrifice, as part of a pre-execution deification ceremony that could last up to a year. Typically, these were warriors captured on the battlefield, and in some cases, after they were killed, their captor was given much of the body for use in tlacatlolli, a special stew of corn and human flesh that was served at a banquet with the captor’s family.

  Today, most countries that use the death penalty as part of their criminal-justice systems offer some sort of last meal. Along with the United States, Japan and South Korea are the only industrialized democracies among the fifty-eight countries in the world that employ capital punishment, and in Japan, the condemned don’t know when they will be executed until the day arrives. In the 2005 documentary Last Supper, by the Swedish artists Mats Bigert and Lars Bergström, Sakae Menda, who spent thirty four years on death row in Japan, said inmates may request whatever they want; if no request is made, prison officials provide “cakes, cigarettes, and drink.” Duma Kumalo, who spent three years awaiting death in South Africa, told the filmmakers that he was served a whole deboned chicken and given seven rand—about six dollars—to purchase whatever else he wanted. “What we bought before execution, it was not things that we wanted to eat,” said Kumalo, who was spared for reasons he does not explain, just hours before he was to be killed. “Those were the things which we were going to leave behind with those who would remain. Because people were starving.”

  In America, where the death rows—like the prisons generally—are largely filled with men from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, last-meal requests are dominated by the country’s mass-market comfort foods: fries, soda, fried chicken, pie. Sprinkled in this mix is a lot of what social scientists call “status foods”—steak, lobster, shrimp—the kinds of foods that in
popular culture conjure up the image of affluence. Every once in a while, though, a request harkens back to what, in the Judeo-Christian West, is the original last meal—the Last Supper, when Jesus Christ, foreseeing his death on the cross, dined one final time with his disciples. Jonathan Wayne Nobles, who was executed in Texas in 1998 for stabbing to death two young women, requested the Eucharist sacrament. Nobles had converted to Catholicism while incarcerated, becoming a lay member of the clergy, and made what was by all accounts a sincere and extended show of remorse while strapped to the gurney. He sang “Silent Night” as the chemicals were released into his veins.

  The musician Steve Earle, whom Nobles asked to be among his witnesses at the execution, wrote of the experience in Tikkun magazine, “I do know that Jonathan Nobles changed profoundly while he was in prison. I know that the lives of other people with whom he came in contact changed as well, including mine. Our criminal justice system isn’t known for rehabilitation. I’m not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore. The problem is that most people who go to prison get out one day and walk among us. Given as many people as we lock up, we better learn to rehabilitate someone. I believe Jon might have been able to teach us how. Now we’ll never know.”

  As of June of this year, governing bodies in the U.S. and its colonial predecessors had executed some 15,825 men and women since the first permanent European settlements were established. The majority of them, it seems, did not get a special last meal; the Newgate Prison parties didn’t make the crossing with William Bradford and John Carver aboard the Mayflower. There is no record of a last meal for George Kendall, believed to be the first Englishman executed in the New World, who was accused of spying for Spain and shot in Jamestown in 1608. (The nature of criminal justice around that time was such that Kendall would also have been shot—or hanged, beheaded, or burned at the stake—for stealing grapes.)