Cooking in Maximum Security is about eating well on the inside - Dining and Cooking

The moka pot is such a fundamental part of Italian culture that even prisoners in maximum security are allowed to keep them in their cells.

Set atop gas-powered camp stoves available for purchase in Italian prison commissaries, the iconic, two-chambered, aluminum coffee maker can produce an espresso just as satisfying and civilized as one brewed on the outside.

Italian prisoners can also iron their uniforms with it, tenderize meat, or crush walnuts, tomatoes, potatoes, or pine nuts, if they have a taste for pesto. They can use it to drive nails through gas canister bottoms to make cheese graters. They can also buy beer, wine, and Parmigiano-Reggiano in the commissary, so long as they have loved ones to send them the euro. In many cases these are the mothers and wives of the men, who passed along their cooking knowledge, along with 20-kilogram parcels of groceries, toiletries, and other personal effects each month.

The moka pot also lent its name to the MoCa Collective, a group of prisoners who coauthored Cooking in Maximum Security in collaboration with visual artist Matteo Guidi.

First published in 2014, the cookbook’s first English translation was released late last year by Chicago’s Half Letter Press, the publishing imprint of local art collective Temporary Services.

It’s a satisfying companion to Half Letter’s earlier Prisoners’ Inventions (2020), which includes a chapter on recipes and cooking techniques from people in California prisons, but also exhibits the same spirit of subversive ingenuity in opposition to high-control environments. Both books are illustrated with fine line drawings by prisoners.

In the case of Cooking in Maximum Security, you might suppose Italian prisoners have it easy. That’s until the appendix: a “Letter from isolation,” written by a man insolitary confinement. It’s a 15-day diary of the miserable rations he subsisted on without his usual cooking tools or ingredients.

That man, Mario Trudu, who served 40 years before dying in prison in 2019, contributed drawings of the recipes and the tools fashioned to execute them: a rolling pin from a broken broomstick; a refrigerator from a polystyrene mozzarella package; an oven from a wooden stool wrapped in newspaper.

There’s a knife/peeler repurposed from a tomato can lid, and a finer one from a pencil-sharpener blade melted into a toothbrush handle. But there’s seemingly no expectation that these utensils will be used for violence or escape (though Trudu did break out and spend ten months on the lam during his sentence). Prisoners use these tools with the knowledge of their captors: Pasta noodles are extruded through holes in plastic bottles. Pizza is baked in bi-level cupboards lined with silver paper from cigarette packages. Cannoli are formed and cooked in empty beer cans.

Cooking in Maximum Security
by Matteo Guidi
Half Letter Press, paperback, 144 pp., $20

The project began in 2009 when Guidi led a workshop on visual communication with a group of men at a prison in central Italy. One mentioned that he baked bread in his cell and used the heat from his television to proof the rising dough. This inspired an almost three-year correspondence between Guidi and his coauthors at several prisons across Italy, culminating in the book’s publication. Since then, a second phase of the project began, focusing on a women’s prison in Spain.

Meanwhile, the book’s translator, who was familiar with Half Letter’s Prisoners’ Inventions, approached cofounders Marc Fischer and Brett Bloom. “It felt like the most obvious and natural book for us to publish in an English edition,” says Fischer.

The recipes in Cooking in Maximum Security are sophisticated and appealing: turnip-top orecchiette “Salernitana-style;” stuffed guinea fowl, apple strudel, plum liqueur. The prisoners who contributed to them are “heroic,” as Guidi points out, in their efforts to achieve some sense of basic human pleasure.

In his introduction, he observes that without photography it’s difficult to picture the physical circumstances of the authors of these recipes. But for intrepid home cooks, the idea of taking up the challenge of fashioning their own prison cooking tools and giving some of these recipes a try isn’t difficult to imagine.