Prison Years

Washing the Bitterness Out

Frightening to think that life could hang on a shred of garbage: on a spiral of orange and white skin uncurling from a fruit, droplets of orange oil escaping from the peel’s bruised cells under a prison inmate’s fingers. As I sat slumped in a flimsy tan plastic chair in the dayroom, the familiar, bleak inner fog weighed my face into heavy-muscled immobility, this dullness a final retreat from the sadness about nothing, about everything, that is depression. I’d gone to the prison serving room for dinner but eaten nothing, the bread like cotton and the peas like paste in my mouth. I lacked the energy to walk the rest of the way to my cell. Once I would have wondered how I would live through the night. By now I knew I didn’t have the drive it takes to defeat my billion body cells in their millions-of-years-evolved, organ by organ determination to go on living.

Even in this heavy state some reflex of my peasant/chef sensibility rebelled at the loss to the trash of what, with a little sugar, contained the possibility of brilliance. “Don’t waste that,” I said. “Let me have it. I’ll make candy.” The words hurled themselves as if memory had tossed a lifeline across the gap between me and all that was living. I got up from the chair.

Within minutes I had half a dozen oranges. They were available everywhere in trade for cigarettes, which had become scarce since the prison canteen stopped selling them two weeks before. My cellmate had stockpiled, and at that time she was probably the richest person in the prison economy. I asked permission to use the inmate kitchen at the end of the corridor and spread my mise-en-place across the counter: sugar, oranges, colander, brown paper grocery bag torn open, laid flat, and sprinkled with sugar to receive the finished product. I managed to keep everyone else out of the kitchen through a combination of acutely territorial body language and the promise of tastes when I finished. I began the rhythmic ritual, the almost-prayer that is the attention to raw food, the knowledge in my hands, the practice controlling pan and heat, the instructions of the recipe, read twenty years ago and often written down for friends.

Cut off the polar caps and score the orange peel right through to the flesh in perfect meridians a quarter of an inch wide at the equator. Peel back the strips of skin gently enough that they don’t crack.

This being a medium security prison, where sharp objects are carefully controlled lest they be used for stabbing, I cut with a plastic knife and was grateful for it. The fruit went into a re-used plastic Cool Whip bowl to become tomorrow’s treat along with apples my cellmate will buy for cigarettes and the banana promised on the breakfast menu.

“In a saucepan with a large surface, cover the strips of peel with cold water. Bring to a boil on high heat, and simmer for eight minutes. Drain, re-cover with cold water, and repeat twice more.”
This step washes the bitterness out and is as old a cooked food itself. According to forager-writer Euell Gibbons, acorns sustained humans in Europe for thousands of years longer than the cereal crops of the present agricultural era. But like foods in use the world over, acorns are so full of bitter tannins that they are poisonous unless boiled in just this way.

“After the three leachings, return the strips to the saucepan and cover them with an approximately equal amount of sugar, adding just enough water to dissolve it. Cook then in this syrup over medium-high heat until they absorb it, about twenty-five minutes. Stir frequently to keep the syrup from scorching in the hot spots on the bottom of the pan.”

During this final cooking I like to arrange the strips in a circular array around the pan, curves all aligned, orange toward the outside, white toward the center. Like so many procedures in cooking and baking, this step started with a purely practical reason. It keeps the peels from being bent backwards and breaking when I stir. It also assures that no peels stick up above the surface of the syrup and fail to take up their share of it. But in the end, this step holds me by its beauty. It’s like calculating the harmonics required to keep a bridge from swaying to the breaking point, only to come up with a Beethoven trio sonata. As a chef I have worked with these resonances for decades and know that they are an expression of the underlying order of the material universe. Neuroscientist Steven Pinker, looking through the lens of evolutionary psychology, suggests that humans’ deep pleasure in esthetics is directly connected with the sense of safety it brings, assuring us that the conditions of the present moment are in line with the conditions in which we evolved.

“Drain the peels of the last bit of syrup and spread them on the sugar-covered brown paper. Sprinkle with additional sugar to keep them from sticking together in a clump. If you have your own kitchen, drain them and let them air dry on waxed paper; they will form finer crystals and be more delicate.

I cleaned up my mess in the kitchen, put a nice heap of the candy for my cellmate and myself, and gave the rest away to the other thirty women in my housing unit. In less than an hour I had come back from the brink of living death. The orange’s nutritious flesh is no match for anhedonia. But the peel, with its pigments and its oils, the essence of what we think of as “orange,” too bitter by itself but reclaimable by a technique older than history, bathed in sugar (itself a one-time vegetable reduced to the essence of sweetness), arranging itself into a miniature of the sun in my pan, calls me back, my will or no.

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About Katherine Power

I didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government….

Recent and Upcoming Appearances & Publications
3/12/19 Peace, Justice and Transformation, Parallel Conference to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, 777 United Nations Plaza, NYC
11/13/18 A Journey from Guerrilla to Grandmother, Lifelong Learners: An Independent Collaborative, Temple Shir Tikva, 141 Boston Post Road, Wayland, MA 01778
10/10/18 Provincetown Women’s Week Reading from Doing Time:Papers from Framingham Prison, AMP, 432 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA
4/6-9/2018 The Nature of Change, Radical Imagination Conference, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
1/15/2014 Complexity and Social Change, Occupy Radio
10/31/2013 Surrender, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR
10/25/2013 Surrender, Taos Community Theater, Taos, NM

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