Matteo Guidi, Cooking in Maximum Security, 2025

Cooking in Maximum Security was compiled by Matteo Guidi, working with people detained in the high surveillance sections of Italian prisons, through a continuous exchange of letters between 2009 and 2013.

This book explains the methods and strategies prisoners use to cook in their cells with few available resources. Making kitchen tools before one can even begin to gather ingredients is a priority in this cookbook. In addition to identifying the necessary utensils, this book also describes how to construct them. Simple objects acquire a whole new value. A broom handle becomes a rolling pin, shoelaces tie rolled bacon for curing, and the cupboard or stool becomes an oven. Even the heat from an old cathode ray tube television helps dough for pizza and bread to rise in the cold environment of a prison cell.

The recipes themselves, for all kinds of classic Italian pasta dishes, sauces, meat preparations, and pastries, reveal a whole new level of skill and ingenuity when the reader learns how they are made in defiance of the discouraging experience of detention.