June 3- 9, 2004

food

Dining Behind Bars

BARE ESSENTIALS: In this archive photograph dated around 1910, an inmate at Eastern State removes bread from the penitentiary ovens. : collection of Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site

Local scholars take a look at prison food and its checkered past.

by John Vettese

There's a reason prison food isn't referred to as "cuisine" more often.

The notion of a plush dining environment for inmates seems, well, a tad inappropriate by today's cynical prison standards.

But paying a debt to society didn't always mean eating badly. According to various historical accounts from Eastern State Penitentiary, the kitchen staff in its day whipped up far more than the proverbial pots of stifling gruel.

"It actually caused a bit of controversy since, in a lot of ways, the convict population ate better than the average man at the time," says Peter McAndrews, longtime chef at Rembrandt's and a local history buff. "I'm from Southwest Philly and grew up in a working-class Irish family. A lot of the food they prepared is the kind of thing we ate."

McAndrews will try his hand at some of those antique recipes this weekend for The Book and the Crook, a series of special tours at Fairmount's monolithic site. Spinning its name from Philadelphia's lauded food expo, the event will present the evolution of eating during Eastern State's 140 years of operation through lectures and artifacts, while McAndrews cooks up samples of typical prison diets from the 1830s and 1950s.

Expanded and more structured in its second year, The Book and the Crook began in 2003 when site staffers noticed a recurrent fascination among visitors over the eating habits of prisoners.

"Kids in particular always want to know about it," says Sean Kelley, program director at Eastern State. "Whether [the food] was warm or cold, what they ate and what life was actually like. It occurred to us that we should somehow illustrate this, where people could actually taste the food or spend some time talking just about the food."

Uncovering what exactly was served wasn't straightforward. Handwritten menus and ledgers detailing food stock purchases are among Eastern State's artifacts, but Norman Johnston, professor emeritus of sociology at Arcadia University and an authority on the prison, says it is difficult to tell how rigidly those menus were followed. Some of his research consults 19th-century investigations by the Pennsylvania Prison Society, and even those reports are questionable.

"There would be official visitors from the outside who would come in and talk to the inmates. But then they would leave and the inmates would be left alone with the guards," Johnston says. "They had to be careful what they said, they weren't always going to complain."

While the quality of the food remains uncertain -- Johnston thinks it was likely cold by the time prisoners got it -- it is clear that the diet was somewhat well-rounded. In the early days, all prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and ate one midday meal with liberal portions of boiled meat, soup, rice and potatoes. Smaller helpings of coffee or tea were doled out in the morning and "Indian mush" was served in the evening.

By the mid-20th century, the solitary system had faded; inmates were employed in the kitchen and got three squares a day featuring eggs, bread, vegetables, meat and even crumb cake for dessert.

Kelley says the site's tour guides interviewed former inmates now housed at Graterford Prison for perspective. Often, those discussions cycle back to food.

"They said back at Eastern, people took real pride in their cooking, it was considered a good job to get in the kitchen," he says. "Nowadays prison kitchens are all industrial, they just have huge vats and entire containers of precooked food."

Looking back to an era when malnutrition among the general populace was common due to hard-to-get ingredients and costly cooking apparatuses, Johnston thinks the inmates probably did eat better than their outside-world counterparts.

"Food habits have changed over time and the idea of a balanced diet is really a contemporary one," he says. "People at that time didn't eat many vegetables. If you look at the prison menus, they were at best getting root vegetables like carrots or turnips, but they didn't mind because they were not used to that."

In preparing for the program, McAndrews spent time researching antique recipes online, which he says "wasn't easy." But he was surprised how the foods he selected closely paralleled dishes at his own restaurant.

"I'll be making some of the Indian mush, which is very similar to something we do, polenta," he says. "It's basically cornmeal boiled down for about an hour, then sweetened with molasses."

For a sample of 1950s fare, McAndrews plans to prepare braised pork with baked navy beans, a common dinner item. While he says preparation methods will be relatively authentic, he will also present comparisons of how the food was cooked in antiquity versus how it is done in restaurants today.

But as Kelley points out, the situation in prisons today is very different, and for current perspective, the exhibit will also show photographs of 21st-century mess halls, donated by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Even Eastern State had industrial leanings by its closure in 1970. Kelley says that, like many other things at the prison, the change in the food reflects the larger history, and its slide from Quaker idealism to later pessimism.

"They opened this building with a tremendous sense of optimism," Kelley says. "The diet reflected this ambitious attempt to reform the idea of prisons. But in the end they were slopping out industrial chow and warehousing inmates. I'm sure we could make a tour addressing the overall history of Eastern State through food, how food of different generations reflects the priorities of that generation."

The Book and the Crook, Sat.-Sun., June 5-6, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., $4-$7.50, Eastern State Penitentiary, 22nd and Fairmount, 215-236-3300, www.easternstate.org.