were experiencing at the time, suited me fine. So I moaned a bit at the thought of early morning wake-ups but they were so solicitous not to wake me that they got up in the dark and left half dressed, putting on the rest of theirclothes outside the room once they went through the door.
A Home Office civil servant in charge of the prison farms some twenty years ago told me that farms, apart from providing fresh and healthy food to prisons at low cost, were also tremendously valuable at getting people to overcome many of their problems as they cared for animals, worked as teams and took responsibility for growing plants, looked after horses, delivered new lambs and worked in the meat shops. The interesting thing is that as a result of the farms in existence the prison service used to be self-sufficient in pork, bacon, potatoes and some other vegetables, but this is no longer the case as most of those farms have been dispensed with – either sold for development, taken over for expansion of other prison facilities or abandoned as the cost of extra supervision of prisoners during their time out was prohibitive. The Royal Society of Arts project Transitions in Wells prison is aimed to try to reverse this. But for the moment the general lack of fresh produce, with some notable exceptions, was easily evident to me as I worked in the kitchen.
Given those constraints, trying to keep the residents in ESP happy was an unenviable task. The poor girls who cooked there were always anxious to find out what people thought. Many had never worked in kitchens before but after a while became interested in becoming chefs themselves. There used to be an NVQ you could get in catering while in ESP but that didn’t seem to be offered anymore, though the girls still learned a lot. In fact, they were experimenting with puddings, fatal for those trying to avoid putting on weight as they ended up often being the best thing on the menu. There were shrieksof enthusiasm when one chef who was retiring came back to ESP for a few days just before the end of his term with the prison service to cook for three days – he was apparently the best pudding maker ESP had ever seen. I watched him make a series of cakes that he was then leaving behind to be served on different nights – he proudly took me round and showed me what he was making and then we went together to each of the ovens where trays full of chocolate sponge, raspberry cheesecake and apricot tarts were proudly displayed. He explained that he had been a chef for the prison service for a long time, and had also experienced big prisons where it was impossible to keep anything warm when you mass-produced food as by the time the food was delivered to and served in the different units around the prison it had inevitably already gone cold and lost a lot of its taste. Cooking for ESP was bliss for him especially as the girls seemed to appreciate it. Reaching retirement age some time ago, he had finally hung up his apron after years of working part-time.
As a result of his skills the enthusiasm for puddings had caught on. I recall being followed around by one of the girls, Helen, who on a number of occasions wanted me to taste the mixture for the apple crumble or the cream that she was intending to use for the cheesecake, which in fact got better and better during the period I was there. Indeed, by the time I was leaving , the apple cake and the apricot sponge served with a huge dollop of packet custard were in my view near perfect. But the girls moaned – as girls do – and they filled in the comments book with negative comments. The poor trainee cooks would pore over them at night – true, sometimes they forgot to add sugar orused the wrong kind of flour, which made a pudding inedible, but I suppose that happens everywhere. They needed encouragement though and one day, looking through the book of comments myself, I found an entry allegedly from me which I had never written. It said: ‘Soup was yummy
A Home Office civil servant in charge of the prison farms some twenty years ago told me that farms, apart from providing fresh and healthy food to prisons at low cost, were also tremendously valuable at getting people to overcome many of their problems as they cared for animals, worked as teams and took responsibility for growing plants, looked after horses, delivered new lambs and worked in the meat shops. The interesting thing is that as a result of the farms in existence the prison service used to be self-sufficient in pork, bacon, potatoes and some other vegetables, but this is no longer the case as most of those farms have been dispensed with – either sold for development, taken over for expansion of other prison facilities or abandoned as the cost of extra supervision of prisoners during their time out was prohibitive. The Royal Society of Arts project Transitions in Wells prison is aimed to try to reverse this. But for the moment the general lack of fresh produce, with some notable exceptions, was easily evident to me as I worked in the kitchen.
Given those constraints, trying to keep the residents in ESP happy was an unenviable task. The poor girls who cooked there were always anxious to find out what people thought. Many had never worked in kitchens before but after a while became interested in becoming chefs themselves. There used to be an NVQ you could get in catering while in ESP but that didn’t seem to be offered anymore, though the girls still learned a lot. In fact, they were experimenting with puddings, fatal for those trying to avoid putting on weight as they ended up often being the best thing on the menu. There were shrieksof enthusiasm when one chef who was retiring came back to ESP for a few days just before the end of his term with the prison service to cook for three days – he was apparently the best pudding maker ESP had ever seen. I watched him make a series of cakes that he was then leaving behind to be served on different nights – he proudly took me round and showed me what he was making and then we went together to each of the ovens where trays full of chocolate sponge, raspberry cheesecake and apricot tarts were proudly displayed. He explained that he had been a chef for the prison service for a long time, and had also experienced big prisons where it was impossible to keep anything warm when you mass-produced food as by the time the food was delivered to and served in the different units around the prison it had inevitably already gone cold and lost a lot of its taste. Cooking for ESP was bliss for him especially as the girls seemed to appreciate it. Reaching retirement age some time ago, he had finally hung up his apron after years of working part-time.
As a result of his skills the enthusiasm for puddings had caught on. I recall being followed around by one of the girls, Helen, who on a number of occasions wanted me to taste the mixture for the apple crumble or the cream that she was intending to use for the cheesecake, which in fact got better and better during the period I was there. Indeed, by the time I was leaving , the apple cake and the apricot sponge served with a huge dollop of packet custard were in my view near perfect. But the girls moaned – as girls do – and they filled in the comments book with negative comments. The poor trainee cooks would pore over them at night – true, sometimes they forgot to add sugar orused the wrong kind of flour, which made a pudding inedible, but I suppose that happens everywhere. They needed encouragement though and one day, looking through the book of comments myself, I found an entry allegedly from me which I had never written. It said: ‘Soup was yummy
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