Ellen Byron

Recipes From the Grave – Literally.

Hi all, Ellen here! Crescent City Christmas Chaos, my fourth Vintage Cookbook Mystery, launches in a week – 11/4, to be exact – and there’s an important plot point built around protagonist Ricki James-Diaz spotting a recipe engraved on a gravestone. Well, you can imagine how thrilled I was to discover someone had compiled a cookbook devoted entirely to recipes culled from gravestone recipes, To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes, which just launched on October 7th. I got in touch with author Rosie Grant with a bunch of questions. She was kind of enough to answer all of them AND share a recipe!

What prompted your interest in gravestone recipes?
During grad school for library science and archival studies, I started a project exploring cemeteries as archives. While researching, I stumbled across a gravestone with a full recipe engraved on it. That discovery sent me down a rabbit hole of uncovering, cooking, and documenting these recipes as a way to preserve memory and explore how food connects us to the dead.

Where have your research trips taken you?
I’ve traveled to hundreds of cemeteries across the U.S. and Canada, from Alaska to New York to Nova Scotia, tracking down recipes carved into headstones.

What was your best find, and where was it?
One of my favorites is Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson’s spritz cookies in Brooklyn, New York. It’s one of the earliest gravestone recipes I discovered and helped inspire the entire project. Her spritz cookie recipe is wonderful.

What was the most memorable adventure you had while tracking down a recipe?
Visiting Kay Andrews’ fudge recipe in Utah was especially memorable. I went in the middle of summer during a heatwave, armed with a cooler full of fudge samples, and ended up sharing them with other visitors in the cemetery who had also made Kay’s fudge and had stopped by to visit her gravestone. It turned into this spontaneous, beautiful communal moment over fudge.

What was the most touching recipe you found?
They’ve all been very touching. While in Arkansas I met with a woman named Peggy who was still alive and had put up her headstone as a part of preplanning when her husband passed away. We cooked her sugar cookie recipe together and her whole family and community showed up to also enjoy the fresh baked cookies with us.

What was the weirdest?
Gravestone recipes inherently are very unusual – I only know of about 50. I think modern gravestone markers are getting much more creative as people think about unique ways they want to be remembered and the technology has improved for creating personalized headstone memorials.

Can you share a recipe with us?

Naomi Miller-Dawson’s Spritz Cookies

Yields five dozen or more 

Ingredients 

One cup room temperature butter or margarine 

¾ cup sugar 

1 teaspoon vanilla 

1 egg 

2 ¼ cups un-sifted flour 

½ teaspoon baking powder 

⅛ teaspoon salt 

Instructions 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. 

In a bowl, cream the butter or margarine thoroughly. Gradually beat in the sugar, vanilla, and egg. Add flour gradually with baking powder and salt. Mix until thoroughly combined. The resulting dough should be soft. 

Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes. 

Working in batches, squeeze the dough through a cookie press onto an ungreased baking sheet. Leave about two inches between each cookie. If desired, you can decorate the cookies with bits of dried fruits, nuts, or chocolate chips. Bake for 8–10 minutes, until a light golden brown. Allow the cookies to cool completely on a rack.

READERS, is there a gravestone recipe in your family? Or one you think should be immortalized?

BIO: Rosie Grant is a digital archivist, researcher, and creator of @GhostlyArchive, where she explores the intersections of food, memory, and grief. Her work documenting and cooking recipes carved into gravestones has been featured on NPR, BBC, Good Morning America, and The Kelly Clarkson Show. Rosie uses storytelling, archival research, and recipe recreation to highlight how food connects us to loved ones across time.

SYNOPSIS: An inspiring collection of recipes preserved on gravestones, with fascinating interviews from the families, celebrating the beloved food legacies of their dearly departed.

For so many, food is a touching, nostalgic thing that brings us together. So much so that some families choose to remember their loved ones through the dishes they made and the food that brought comfort to those around them by immortalizing their recipes on their gravestones.

Rosie Grant, the creator behind @GhostlyArchive, has been searching out and documenting this interesting phenomenon. In To Die For, Rosie collects 40 recipes she’s found across the globe, carved into headstones or associated with a grave that has a story to share. Each recipe is accompanied by an interview with the remaining family, plus photography of the food, the gravestone, and any memorabilia the family wanted to share.

Recipes include:

  • Spritz Cookies
  • Homemade Fudge
  • Chicken Soup
  • French Silk Pie
  • Guava Cobbler

…and more!

PURCHASE LINK

35 thoughts on “Recipes From the Grave – Literally.”

  1. I love this post and I love the idea of recipes being shared on gravestones. Ellen, thank you for interviewing Rosie. And Rosie thank you for sharing some of the beautiful experiences you had researching To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes.

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  2. Sadly, the who and where of this have left my feeble mind, but a woman I worked with many years ago lost her grandmother who would never share the recipe for her spice cake. She always said “over my dead body”. When she died, the recipe was etched on her grave, but with one still ingredient missing! Even her family didn’t know what it was and honestly, no matter what her granddaughter tried, she could never quite replicate the taste.

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    2. That’s one interesting grandma. Too bad she didn’t tell the secret to just ONE trustworthy relative so her family could enjoy it through time (in a living sense). Wonder if she made her recipe up, or it was handed down to her. Hope it was the former, or she may be dealing with some very unhappy ghost relatives wherever she is. (Making spice cake is hard, though, right? Maybe she hated the chore.)

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  3. What a great post! Thank you, Ellen and Rosie! I loved the heartwarming stories about the fudge community and the sugar cookie baking.

    I can’t remember where I first heard about gravestone recipes, but I think they’re such a neat idea. I’m not sure what family recipe we’d have etched–though there is a great date bar one!

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  5. I had never heard of gravestones with recipes until recently. What a fascinating idea. I look forward to checking out Rosie Grant’s book on the subject. My mom would have loved the idea and would probably have chosen her chocolate chip cookie recipe.

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  6. I had never heard of this until I was reading your new book last week. Now I’m very intrigued by it. I guess with only 50 of them out there, I will have a hard time finding one nearby to view.

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  7. I love this so much! Robin and I are great fans of visiting cemeteries and love finding interesting headstones–ones with photos of the person or with fun quotes (“I told you I was sick” was one we saw in Key West).

    We’ve even bought a plot for the two of us in Santa Cruz and have already chosen the photo to go on it–of us on our front porch in Hilo with cocktails in our hands. So perhaps I should also put a cocktail recipe on our grave, too!

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    3. You definitely should, Leslie! Maybe someone else in your cemetery will provide an appetizer recipe so people can nosh and raise a glass to you all!

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      1. Pat, Rosie tells a story about how she made one person’s gravestone fudge and when she went to eat it there to honor them, she found another family who had made the fudge, too! They ended up comparing notes on how their batches turned out!

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  8. How cool! I love cemeteries and find stories like this fascinating. Can you imagine being the engraver having to write all that out?! Thanks for sharing … I’m going to go think about whether I should make snicker doodles or carrot cake!

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    2. The art of old-fashioned gravestone engraving is slowly dying, sadly. They often use digital transfers and lasers now.

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  10. Wow, this is an amazing interview with Rosie, El! I had no idea recipes on gravestones were even a thing until I heard the setup for your book. (Can’t wait!) We have a recipe in our family for something called banberries, which half the family hates (including my kids) and half adore (like me). There’s a lot of sticky raisin and nut chopping in it, plus the pastry. My sister makes it sometimes for holidays, but I think she considers it more of a curse, lol.

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