How A Gravestone Recipe Cookbook Commemorates The Dead

Have you ever thought about what you might want inscribed on your gravestone? Aside from the obvious text — name and dates of birth and death — the task of selecting a few unchanging words to sum up your existence or that of a loved one may feel like an insurmountable challenge.

Something that evokes sense memories and the emotions that come with them seems like it could come at least a little closer to summing up a precious person — or even yourself. If you’re searching for a piece of text that sparks the recollection of texture, taste, sight, and smell, a recipe might just do the trick.

Author Rosie Grant’s debut book, To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipescollects 40 recipes from around the worldthat are carved into a headstone or associated with one — such as a recipe title that’s etched into a gravestone without its instructions. Complete with interviews with the families connected to each gravesite, Grant’s cookbook is a thoughtful tribute to the strong ties between specific dishes and their makers and the legacy those relationships leave behind.

Although To Die For was just published this month on October 7, you may have come across its author’s work before. Grant has spent the past four years locating gravestone recipes, speaking with the decedents’ families, making each recipe, and then bringing the finished dish back to its owner’s final resting place to enjoy the food next to them. She’s documented her journey online, taking photos and videos of each prepared recipe next to its creator’s gravestone and building up over 200,000 followers on both Instagram and TikTok along the way.

Grant’s digital platform and eventual book highlighting gravestone recipes was a pursuit that started somewhat by accident. While getting a graduate degree in library sciences at the University of Maryland, she interned at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., working with the institution’s archives. As Grant told Food & Wine, this was where she learned about her first gravestone recipe on the marker of a woman named Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson, who was buried in The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Grant came across Naomi’s Spritz Cookies — for which you’ll find a recipe in the book — during the pandemic, a time when many of us were spending a lot more time in the kitchen at home. “I just wondered what gravestone cookies tasted like,” she said. “While I was making Naomi’s cookies, I posted the process on TikTok, and things just kind of exploded overnight.”

Grant continued, “I got so many messages from people who had their own food and memory storiesespecially stories of people who had had a loved one pass away and how they were using food to remember them. It was honestly so beautiful and heartbreaking but also lovely at the same time. While I was learning more about who Naomi was, I learned there were several other people who did the same thing.”

Connecting with the family of each gravestone recipe is an important part of Grant’s process. After locating a new dish, she reaches out to related family members through Facebook, Instagram, or staff at a cemetery to see if they’d be interested in and comfortable with a phone call.

Families gave permission for the publication of each recipe in the final cookbook and sat for interviews highlighting how they remembered their loved ones. Tracking down family members who remember the deceased is made easier by the fact that these headstones are relatively recent. Grant notes that all of the gravestone recipes she’s found tend to come from people who have died in the last 20 years, likely because modern tools make it much easier to customize a gravestone.

Talking with family members is essential for understanding how to accurately make many of the recipes Grant has come across. There’s not always room on a headstone for the entire list of recipe instructions. Naomi’s only includes the required ingredients, and in cases like that of Beverly Lofland, whose grave marker simply says “She made the best meatloaf,” Grant needed to speak with relatives to learn the full recipe and the history behind it.

What clearly shines through when speaking with Grant is her deep respect for all of the people who were so known for these recipes that they became part of their eternal legacy. To honor the memories of everyone in To Die ForGrant didn’t just cook the recipes; she traveled to the gravestone associated with each one so she could pay her respects to the departed with their signature dish. This wasn’t always easy. She once carried homemade ice cream through a summer rainstorm to bring it to a remote cemetery in Maine. Grant recalls that “It was downpouring. It was like a summer flood… The ice cream that I’d put together, it was melting, and I was just like, ‘What am I doing?’”

Once at a grave, Grant typically reads the occupant’s obituary or speaks with their family on the phone to reflect on the life of the departed together. “Every time you make that person’s recipe, you’re tasting the things that they had in life,” Grant said. “You’re smelling it for the family members. They’re going back to every holiday. It just brings that person’s memory back so fully.”

Throughout the book you’ll find a variety of gravestone recipes for pies, cakes, cookies, cobblers, fudge, ice cream, and bread. The dishes people choose to put on their headstones tend to skew toward the sweet side, but there are savory highlights too. In addition to Beverly’s meatloaf, dinner options include Karen Nelson’s Spaghetti Chicken Casserole and Whanitta Sheetz’ Fried Ripe Tomato, among six other savory contributions.

Grant explained that roughly half of the recipes she’s found were put on headstones by loved ones of a person who had died, while the other half are typically chosen by the deceased. For a few passionate home cooks, that means pre-planning a headstone featuring their signature recipes so that family members don’t have to worry about it in a time of grief.

Thanks to this level of forethought, you may even spot a gravestone recipe that commemorates someone who is alive, like Christine Hammill’s “A Good Carrot Cake.” The headstone sporting the recipe for this simple spice cake is located right next to that of Christine’s husband, who is also still alive.

Thinking about the tastes and flavors you leave behind for others to remember you by is a poignant task, and if you don’t know what recipe might define you, that’s more than okay. But exploring your own creativity in the kitchen to see if you can come up with something that feels authentically, originally you and may even be worthy of passing down can’t hurt either.