Description

100 Prison Recipes: Ramen, Hustle, and Survival in a World Without Kitchens
by Able Bronson

What happens when you take away kitchens, lock away ingredients, and give a man nothing but instant noodles, sugar packets, and a plastic spork? You don’t kill his appetite—you spark his imagination.

100 Prison Recipes is a raw, hilarious, and unexpectedly heartfelt guide to cooking behind bars, where creativity is the only real seasoning and a bag of ramen is worth more than gold. Written by Able Bronson, a larger-than-life underground “chef” with tattoos of honey buns and sporks to prove his devotion, this book is part cookbook, part survival manual, and part memoir of life lived one spread at a time.

Inside these pages, you’ll find:

• 100 actual recipes created from commissary staples, ranging from the practical (Stretch-a-Soup, Lockdown Bread Pudding) to the absurd (Toothpaste Honey Bun Deluxe, Sardine Cheesecake).

• Funny origin stories that explain how each dish was born—whether through desperation, boredom, or pure culinary madness.

• Cultural lessons from inside, showing how food isn’t just about eating—it’s about politics, respect, grief, celebration, and survival.

• A mix of tones: laugh-out-loud disasters, gritty lessons about hunger and respect, and heartfelt stories of comfort food shared during moments of loss.

Able Bronson doesn’t romanticize prison life—but he does show how even the harshest conditions can’t kill human ingenuity. Food becomes more than calories. It’s power. It’s therapy. It’s community. It’s rebellion. And sometimes, it’s just the only reason to get through the night.

Whether it’s “Ramen Pizza” for movie night, “Gangland Chili Bowl” as a peace treaty, or a humble “Grief Cake”shared when someone loses family on the outside, each recipe carries a story. Some will make you laugh until your stomach hurts. Some will remind you how fragile—and how strong—people can be when everything else is stripped away.

Written in the gritty, no-nonsense style of an underground Paladin Press manual but laced with humor and humanity, 100 Prison Recipes is more than a cookbook. It’s a survival guide for anyone who’s ever had to make do with less—and a testament to the fact that when life takes everything away, the human spirit still finds a way to stir the pot.

This isn’t gourmet. This isn’t pretty. But it’s real. And it might just change the way you look at a packet of ramen forever.