RIKERS ISLAND, N.Y.—On Christmas, the dinner menu at one of the nation’s most notorious jail complexes will include roast beef au jus, baked potatoes, whole-wheat bread and mixed vegetables. But there won’t be Christmas cookies for dessert.
“The carrot cake is the pièce de résistance,” said E. Glenn O’Connor, the New York City jail system’s director of nutritional services.
Paris has croissants. Belgium has waffles. And Rikers Island has carrot cake. The spiced loaf is the jails’ most famous food and the only dessert served on holidays.
The jail’s more than 50-year-old bakery produces about 2,500 loaves annually, resulting in 62,500 slices served (without frosting) on occasions including Thanksgiving, Christmas and the end of Ramadan.
“It’s synonymous with Rikers,” said Mr. O’Connor, whose prior jobs involved feeding people in other captive situations, including in airplanes and hospitals. “It’s built into the culture that that’s the expectation.”
Understanding jail carrot cake requires understanding the outsize role of food behind bars. Food can incite riots. It can keep peace. It is currency to be traded. In a world of shackles and bars and someone else’s rules, to some food is a reminder that you’re still human.
It’s also the subject of frequent conversation and creativity. Inmates concoct recipes from available ingredients. How to make banana pudding, according to two former inmates: Crush commissary vanilla wafers in their bag and add hot water. Mix inside the wafer bag until mushy. Bake on scalding hot radiator. Layer banana, sliced to taste, on the baked wafers.
As for carrot cake, according to Rikers Island lore, staff first baked it in a jail bakery in the 1940s. Another dessert, like frosted chocolate cake, would have required special ingredients and was viewed as too decadent for the clientele, Mr. O’Connor said. The ingredients for carrot cake were already in the kitchen.
Soon after, the recipe was formalized and the cake became a holiday mainstay. The island’s only sanctioned treat was born.
These days, hundreds of bags of flour sit on pallets inside an industrial bakery that serves some 8,000 inmates. But other cake ingredients are guarded under lock and key. A walk-in refrigerator holds yeast and raisins, both coveted ingredients in jailhouse hooch.
“We call it Fort Knox,” correction officer Norris Islar, who works in the bakery, said of the fridge.
For the bakery, the major carrot-cake production happens during the weeks before Thanksgiving and Christmas. Inside the bakery last month, the aroma of nutmeg and cinnamon wafted from an area labeled Cake Room. Kay Fraser, the senior baker, directed inmates in hairnets and orange-and-white striped jumpsuits.
The inmates, who earn 79 cents an hour, dumped 25 pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of flour and other dry ingredients into industrial mixers. Next came raisins, plump from soaking in water overnight. Adding raisins before the wet ingredients keeps them suspended throughout the loaf. “So they won’t sink so much,” Ms. Fraser said, before shooing away a visitor attempting to photograph her recipe.
Next the inmates added buckets of chopped carrots, walnuts, eggs, vanilla and several gallons of oil. The loaves are baked in an industrial oven so old that replacement parts are made by an on-site machinist.
About 40 minutes later, golden-brown loaves emerged. Some reviews of the final product, from its consumers over the years: “It’s almost a gingerbread kind of thing,” said inmate Richard Giordano, 57, who is serving a 7-month sentence for theft. “I hope I get two pieces.”
“Big chunks of carrots,” recalled Samuel Arroyo, 50, an inmate at Rikers in 1990 and 1991. “I’ve had better. I miss the icing,” said Dave Fullard, an employee at Rikers from 1982 through 2011 who blames “a couple pounds” on the cake.
The week before Thanksgiving, shortly before his release, Terrell Davis was working at the bakery while finishing up his six-month sentence. Mr. Davis, 27, said he planned to skip pumpkin pie when he had Thanksgiving dinner at home and teach his 7-year-old daughter to make Rikers carrot cake instead.
“I did ask [senior baker] Kay to give me a lesson,” he said, when asked how he would reduce the 25-loaf recipe. “She explained it was teaspoons instead of ounces.”
Besides being an officer or an inmate, there is one other way to eat cake. Attend a high-level meeting on the island. Mr. O’Connor said those important enough to be served cake include the mayor and his wife. He didn’t know who else makes the cut.
“I don’t attend those meetings,” he said.
An incomplete survey of local bigwigs yielded two important enough for cake. Carrot cake was served at a meeting that included former Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who investigated what he called a culture of violence at Rikers, and U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who oversaw the resulting settlement, according to a person who ate cake at that meeting.
Mr. Bharara and Judge Swain declined to comment. City officials have said they intend to close Rikers Island in about a decade and create a smaller and safer jail system.
As for Mr. O’Connor, the jails’ nutritional-services director, might he consider changing next year’s holiday menus to a Thanksgiving pie or Christmas cookie?
Mr. O’Connor looked aghast. “Only if I plan on retiring the next day.”
Write to Corinne Ramey at Corinne.Ramey@wsj.com
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