How Prison Cooking Became My Hustle: Lessons From Pasta to Taffy

James Berman recalls how learning the craft of prison cooking turned into both a survival skill and an unlikely connection to memories of making pasta in Italy.

I learned the candy craft early in my tenure. It’s a good way to make money, “Big Head” told me. As a chef out in the real world, I couldn’t conceive how sugar could be melted, flavored, pulled, and packaged without the conveniences of a practical kitchen. The culinary fire power of this cinderblock hotel is limited to a microwave and a hot water dispenser. The cook in me is used to the tools of a commercial kitchen, like the ones that I reluctantly left behind.

Lessons from Italy to Prison Cooking

I never would have thought that spending time in the Ascoli valley of eastern Italy would pay dividends to a felon making taffy in northern Delaware. What seems like a lifetime ago held a colorful and flavorful passage roaming and learning in a mountaintop village.

I met a miserable and wise pasta shop owner who taught me—or at least tried to—the Jedi art of crafting pasta dough. Returning to his shop every few years to continue my accidental apprenticeship, he became less abrasive and more of a friend. He softened enough that I could bring my younger daughter along to share the experience of learning the technique.

In those lessons of manipulating egg yolks, 00 flour, and scant olive oil, we discovered together the feel of pasta dough. Sometimes the dough was rolled to arm’s length sheets for timballo, other times cut for pappardelle, or splayed out for ravioli. Other times, under Alessandro’s watchful countenance, we made gnocchi dough of potatoes, winter flour, and eggs.

Turning Gnocchi Technique Into Prison Cooking

It’s within this hellscape of penance that I test my mettle of building gnocchi dough, using those mechanics to craft the candy. Making sticky jailhouse taffy is much like mixing and forming the dough which my daughter and I shared in the windowless closet of a kitchen in the back of Sandro’s shop. Equal pressure along the rope of taffy dough, applying force from the center and fanning my fingers outward.

Prison Cooking as an Economy

My prep table doubles as a chess board when it isn’t covered with a trash bag that I use to prevent my dough from sticking to the table. Ever the environmentalist, I pull apart the bag to repurpose the plastic as the packaging for individual pieces of taffy. I get $1 per piece, which is decent income when most inmate workers get a staggering 20 cents an hour in their prison jobs.

I pinch a trash bag and gloves from the officers’ desk, so I don’t have any production costs for non-food materials. I grease the hand of a few guys in the commissary who allow me to exceed my purchase limit of nondairy creamer. “Spunk,” “Jebidiah,” and “Zen” get a free piece or two for their cooperation.

My cellmate asks if it’s my shakra or my aura that I impart into my technicolor taffy creations. Mostly, it’s my need to make money, which comes in the form of bags of tuna, instant noodles, and freeze-dried coffee. I also find myself in good favor with some of the guys, which can be valuable equity to have as an older white guy.

The income allows me to send some money to my pasta-rolling daughter. She works too much and is on the lousy end of health issues. If I can bolster her bank account to offset her book addiction—even if just a little—it makes me feel like not a total parental disaster.

A Currency Beyond Money

The medium of exchange is so much more practical than actual money. A batch of prison cooking easily nets me four pouches of sardines, two bags of Spanish rice, a pouch of chili, a few instant ramen, and three envelopes of oatmeal. I cook four batches of taffy in an evening, so the take gets pretty hefty.

Somewhere in taffy making, I embed some good karma, make a few shekels, relive pasta-rolling nostalgia, and promote my own self-worth in financial independence. In the end, prison cooking is more than a hustle—it’s a survival tool, a memory trigger, and a way to preserve dignity inside prison walls.

Trashy Taffy

Yield: Ten 6″ pieces

1 bag (10 oz) nondairy creamer

5 packets single-serve drink mix (e.g., fruit punch, strawberry lemonade, berry blue)

2 Tbsp cold water

In a 2-quart mixing bowl, combine creamer and drink packets. Pour water into dry mix. Best mixed with a gloved hand, continue stirring until dough gathers. It will seem impossibly dry; resist adding more water. When the mixture comes together, turn out onto a clean, nonporous surface. Knead the dough, folding over itself, until the coloring is evenly distributed and the taffy becomes pliable—approximately 3-5 minutes.

Divide the taffy into two equal-sized logs. Working with one of the pieces, roll from the center, working outwards, applying even pressure until the newly formed rope is approximately 30″ long.

Cut into five even pieces. Repeat with remaining log. Wrap the pieces individually in plastic wrap.

For larger batches and multiple colors/flavors, mix as above and divide each color evenly. For example, if working with four flavors, make four logs of each color. Place a log of each color on the work surface and stack with each additional color. Roll as above to create tie-dyed taffy.

Want to read more? Don’t miss Prison Food at Its Strangest: Catching and Cooking a Seagull to Survive

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