These tombstone recipes celebrate life from beyond the grave
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Rosie Grant has always been familiar with death. Parents who led ghost tours, coupled with cutting through a cemetery on her route home from high school, helped her feel relatively comfortable with the topic. What she wasn’t so familiar with were the recipes that found new life in death.
In her new cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes,” the L.A.-based archivist and social media personality dives into the world of tombstones etched with recipes that the deceased loved in life: a fan-favorite Texas sheet cake from a beautician, snickerdoodle cookies that helped feed California firefighters, guava cobbler that scented a Florida neighborhood.
Grant is now sharing these recipes and the stories of those who made them in life.
“I think there’s a lot of taboo around death, which is understandable,” she said. “It’s a scary concept that we will die, but I think what I like about gravestone recipes is, to me, it’s very life-affirming. … It’s such a celebration of this person’s life, and it embodies them hosting people. It’s not just like, ‘She liked baking,’ or ‘Cooking was her love,’ or whatever. It’s literally the ingredients to continue something forward of theirs, which also feels so for-the-living.”
Grant stumbled upon the practice during a pandemic-spurred internship at the historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. With libraries, archives and other institutions physically closed during COVID-19, Grant — then in a library-sciences masters program — was having trouble finding somewhere to intern.
But the cemeteries, she said, were open and busier than ever.
She spent her time in the archives and created “pseudo-online tours” of some of the most famous permanent residents, while in one of her classes, she was tasked with creating a social media account. Her online presence — @ghostly.archive — was born.
It spread quickly on “Gravetok,” or the corner of TikTok devoted to death, and now Grant has hundreds of thousands of followers between that platform and Instagram. She began posting about her experiences interning at a cemetery, then began incorporating memorials she found interesting both in and out of the Congressional Cemetery.
One in Brooklyn caught her eye: A tombstone belonging to Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson featured a more familiar epitaph (“Beloved mother, aunt, grandmother & great-grandmother”) as well as the pages of an open book created out of stone, engraved with the recipe for Spritz Cookies.
“It was the pandemic, so we were all home cooking a lot more, and I think more apt to try new recipes,” Grant said. “So I was like, ‘I wonder what gravestone cookies taste like? You know, they must be pretty good if they’re on her gravestone.’”
Grant filmed herself making them, posted the video to her account and woke up the next day to find it had gone viral. Comments and messages streamed in at a rapid clip: They make their father’s chili every year to remember him, they recently lost their mother and have been making her cookie recipe to feel close to her.
The clear connection between food and memory in — and long after — death encouraged Grant to seek out more tombstone recipes. By the time she’d posted roughly 10 of them, families were reaching out about their own late relatives’ gravesites, and they’re still pouring in. Grant is up to nearly 60, and her new cookbook details 40 of them.
She interviews the families and shares memories of their loved ones. The new cookbook features photos, recollections and color that help celebrate the people who created and proliferated these recipes in life.
Sometimes they cook their loved ones’ recipe along with Grant. Sometimes Grant prepares the recipes, then makes a pilgrimage to the gravesites (always picking up after herself to avoid attracting vermin with her plates of cookies, pies, cakes and beyond).
As she relocated from D.C. to Los Angeles, Grant stopped at multiple sites along the way. During one of these visits, she and her mom arrived with a plate of fudge made using the grave’s recipe — and another family, unrelated to the deceased, was also there to visit the memorial. They also held a container of fudge. The couple was there to teach their child about death, but in a relatable manner. They traded fudge with each other.
Tombstone recipes have shown Grant new forms of community, and a new way of appreciating life.
“As this project has grown and I started interviewing folks about why they decided to put this recipe on their gravestone, all of the families were saying, ‘Well, they would host the meals, and they would host our birthdays, and they would celebrate people,’” Grant said. “There’s a labor of love in cooking for other people and serving, and I just find that it’s so powerful: the communal ties that come from that.”
Over the course of writing “To Die For,” she began planning her own tombstone recipe. Grant decided on clam linguine, which can also be found in the book.
“I mean, it’s definitely not a normal cookbook,” she said. “I wanted all the stories of the person behind them. If you want a recipe, you can go to L.A. Times Cooking and get a really good recipe that’s been well-tested. But for this, it was a deeper story about community and legacy. … There’s also something really nice about being like, you know, life’s short. Enjoy the cookie.”
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Mary’s Clubhouse Cracker Bars With Chocolate Butterscotch Topping
This recipe comes from the late Mary Silvernail, who served these cracker bars for years across North Dakota and Illinois until her death in 2023. They’re still a crowd-pleaser today: These sweet-salty, no-bake treats are held together with layers of graham cracker caramel and topped with butterscotch chocolate, which is made all the more decadent with peanut butter. Addictive, rich and great for any gathering, it’s no wonder the Silvernail family wanted to share this recipe with the world.
Get the recipe.
Cook time: About 1 hour, plus chilling time. Makes about 30 bars.
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