To make JB’s Pizza, crush and mix a sleeve of Saltine crackers, three packs of Ramen noodles and a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Add a little water, then flatten the resulting crust on cardboard and microwave for six minutes. Spread on pizza sauce or chili and add chopped up mozzarella, a jalapeno pepper, pepperoni slices, a tub of jalapeno cheese, two meat logs, and another bag of crushed Cheetos. Back to the microwave for eight minutes.
This recipe from Justin “JB” Walmer, an inmate at Jackson Correctional Institution in Wausau, is one of more than 60 culinary creations collected in Canteen Cuisine, a new cookbook published by Wisconsin Books to Prisoners, a Madison-based nonprofit that does what its name suggests. The all-volunteer group, originally a project of A Room of One’s Own bookstore, has been around since 2006. It has previously produced zines for inmates on topics like exercise, drawing and chess, but this is its first book written in collaboration with inmates.
All of the recipes — for savory and sweet dishes, beverages, and snacks — use only the limited ingredients available through prison canteens (commissaries). Many are common dishes made in uncommon ways. For instance, the recipe for buffalo wings involves shredding canteen-bought chicken breasts, adding Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and some Kraft ranch salad dressing, mixing until “the ingredients are the consistency of lubricated rubber,” then slicing into one-and-a-half-inch logs.
“The recipes are a testimony to prisoners’ creativity, culinary skills, and their ingenious use of improvised cooking gear,” writes Camy Matthay of Wisconsin Books to Prisoners. One trick revealed in the book is for melting cheese on bagels: Insert a bare light bulb through the bagel hole, return to socket, and toast to taste.
Canteen Cuisine, which will be available to the public at A Room of One’s Own for $10 and to inmates for free, contains more than just recipes. It discusses prison nutrition, the inadequacy of prison food, and the difficulty of affording supplementary canteen purchases. An inmate making the low-end prison wage of 12 cents an hour, for instance, would have to work 65 hours to afford the ingredients for Wisconsin Secure Program Facility inmate James Terry II’s four-serving Sports Enthusiast’s Faux Pas Chicken Fingers.
Matthay notes that some people “believe prison should be as punishing as possible” and “may see little reason for prisons to serve much more than bread and water.” But she argues that better food means healthier inmates. She quotes from the late rapper Prodigy’s own prison cookbook: “[I]n a world where prisoners are treated like animals, we made our experiences there feel more human by how we prepared our food.”
A book release party for Canteen Cuisine will be held Oct. 16 at the Social Justice Center, 1202 Williamson St., from 5 to 9 p.m.
