Cooking With the Dead: ‘To Die For’ tries out recipes etched on tombstones

Who d have guessed that the place to find a killer spritz cookie recipe would be inside a cemetery But that s just where Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson s cookie recipe lives etched in stone at her final resting place at Brooklyn s Green-Wood Cemetery Related Articles Q A Samin Nosrat on her new cookbook Good Things Need inspiration for fall cooking Grab these cookbooks Recipe Vegan watermelon seed and cashew ricotta With her new cookbook vegan cheese pioneer hopes to democratize food The Bay Area culinary club that s eating its way through history When archivist Rosie Grant who was was completing an internship at Congressional Cemetery in Washington D C learned about this recipe on a gravestone back in she decided to bake the cookies and share a video of the experience on her TikTok account ghostlyarchives Comments poured in and she learned that there were gravestone recipes scattered across the U S So began her quest to cook the recipes and learn the stories of the people behind them a project that eventually yielded an entire -recipe cookbook Grant s book is more than a cookbook copying over these recipes etched in stone however It also explores the intersections of food legacy and memory while providing background information and missing details to enable anyone to cook these recipes at home We in the past few days caught up with her to learn more about her brand-new cookbook To Die For A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes Harvest which came out Oct Responses have been edited for length and clarity To Die For cookbook author Rosie Grant is the creator behind GhostlyArchive a TikTok account she started while an intern at Congressional Cemetery After finding and cooking a recipe she ascertained on a tombstone she kept discovering more recipes and made a cookbook out of the collection Courtesy of Jill Petracek Q What inspires someone to put a recipe on their gravestone A A lot of modern gravestones are very personalized Maybe years ago or even years ago there would be one carver who would make a bunch of templated stones and then just add someone s name and dates It was pretty standardized Nowadays it s a blank slate that you get to fill in based on what was vital to you That might be a recipe a music quote or even a call number to someone s book in the library or a reference to their dogs In a lot of cases shared in the book these people were home cooks They hosted the holidays They loved food There are a lot of central locality figures the ones who would do the volunteer event host Christmas or Thanksgiving or make people s special birthday treats They used food to show love and celebrate other people Q Were largest part of the recipe gravestones you discovered modern A Pretty modern The oldest one is from a gentleman Joe Sheridan He is attributed with inventing Irish coffee The story goes that Joe was in Ireland and this plane came in with a bunch of travelers He was basically the airport chef and it was raining All the passengers were cold and they petitioned Joe to make something to warm them up So he made them his hangover cure Irish coffee Joseph Sheridan known for popularizing Irish coffee in the U S was a chef at the Foynes Airport in Ireland in the s who introduced a plane full of stranded passengers to his hangover cure Word spread to passage writer Stanton Delaplane then the club at Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco who worked with Sheridan to perfect the recipe Courtesy of Jill Petracek There was a journey and food writer named Stan Delaplane who when he went back to New York wrote about the Irish coffee and it became this whole thing In San Francisco the Buena Vista Cafe heard about it They flew Joe to San Francisco and he basically re-created it with the restaurant owner and with Stan And now the Buena Vista is considered the birthplace of Irish coffee He s buried in Oakland and his gravestone says he gave the gift to his world his Irish coffee recipe And so he doesn t even have the recipe written on it but I got permission from the Buena Vista Cafe to include it To Die For A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes by Rosie Grant Harvest showcases recipes carved into gravestones and tells the stories of the people behind them Courtesy of Harvest Q You went and visited all of these gravestones and interviewed family members What were various of the things you learned while doing this research A The first recipe I just thought was a one-off But it was during the pandemic so I thought I would try to make it because why not So I cooked it and I posted about the process and things kind of exploded overnight People were sending all these messages asking lots of questions thinking through what they would put on their gravestone if they had a recipe or even talking about people in their lives who had passed away and the recipes that they cooked to remember them After I learned there were others I made a big Google doc and map and I started pinning where these folks are buried I used Find a Grave which is like the Wikipedia of gravestones and obituaries The obituary listed out their next of kin so from there I would reach out to friends and family I would send them a note Sometimes I would just contact as a large number of people as I could find I would get email addresses that bounced or in one event I messaged this one woman on Facebook every six months for two years and later learned she d been dead for four years The families have all been so lovely It s a fine tightrope to talk to people who have lost someone and I yearned to be thoughtful about what they requested Specific people just craved to communicate via email or Instagram messenger because it hurt to talk about I also had to test the recipes Usually the first time I would make it extremely wrong reading it directly from the gravestone And then I would do more research I would meet with the families and in particular cases cook with them I would learn the tools that they would use Q Particular of the recipes were incomplete A Yeah I mean an epitaph only has so much space Majority of these recipes are pretty simple It s not a lasagna or something that would take four gravestones to write out But in particular cases the families got creative So with Naomi they didn t put the instructions They just put the ingredients to her spritz cookies Another family had a handwritten recipe card lasered onto a woman s gravestone and they knew all the background details of how she would make her chicken soup I as a stranger had to work with them to get the full recipe and then that would be what ended up in the cookbook Q Is it usually the person who dies or the surviving relatives who decide on the gravestone recipe A It s about half and half In various cases it was the relatives of the person who had passed away trying to memorialize someone who was in a lot of cases larger than life and very giving Sharing a recipe does more than just communicate She loved baking or She was a great host It shares the tools for someone else to now partake in this tradition It s such an embodiment of who each of these people was Three of the recipes in the book are really from women who are still alive One is a woman named Peggy who lives in Arkansas Her husband had passed away and they were putting up their gravestone together since they share a marker On his side was his hobbies and things that he liked Asking herself What do I want to be remembered for for her side of the marker she was like I m really darn proud of my cookie recipe When I met with her and cooked with her all of these people established up I thought it would be for the novelty of chosen random TikToker making cookies But they notified me No we heard Peggy s making cookies We drop everything when we know she s making these cookies In Ferndale California Christine and her husband are doing pre-planning and have already purchased and engraved their gravestones in a beautiful cemetery His says I should have listened to my wife And hers says Yeah look where we ended up Her carrot cake recipe is on the back Q How has this project changed how you reflect on death A My parents are both ghost tour guides We talk about cemeteries all the time and we love a good ghost story But when it came to the actual death side of things I hadn t been aware of the death-positive movement the idea that it s healthy to talk about death loss and our own mortality Where do you look for the people you ve lost There s still so much of them with you and it shows up in a lot of really joyful approaches For me it s been a very positive side to something that I personally revealed really scary Q Anything else A If anyone knows of any intriguing gravestones I m dependably all ears Details Follow Rosie Grant on TikTok at ghostlyarchive and Instagram at ghostly archive Her cookbook To Die For A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes Harvest is out Oct