In addition to wanting to eat better food, there’s another reason cooking is such a popular pastime in prison: it’s therapeutic. It’s medically proven that some experience less stress and improve quality of life/relationships by being in the kitchen. Any chef will tell you that he or she feels right “at home” no matter how calm or chaotic the kitchen. The same is true even in the prison kitchen.
“It’s just relaxing and you almost forget where you’re at for an hour or two,” Prodigy says. “It helps people get along, too. Sometimes if you’ve got a group of people in there that are cool with each other, we’d order a chicken [from the commissary] together or make a dinner.”
The most important part of prison cooking, Prodigy writes, is the seasonings. Luckily, he was able to get his hands on spices like Goya Sazón and Adobo, as well as garlic, onion and curry powders. Of course, ramen seasoning packets were popular behind bars, but because each packet contains about 1,000 mg of sodium, Prodigy had to get creative and use something else.
Prodigy credits the success of his prison recipes to an inmate from the Virgin Islands who had been a chef on the outside. Prodigy and others gave this inmate food to cook, and soon the chef started explaining how to do things like debone canned fish or create a sauce.
“He was showing me different techniques and eventually I started making up my own recipes and cooking them,” Prodigy writes. “I found that preparation is everything when you cook.” He says that even people on the outside heap on spices when food is done cooking rather than during the prep stages, when you can get the best flavor.