Recipes from Beyond the Grave with Rosie Grant
Photo by Jill Petracek
Have you ever thought about what you might put on your gravestone? A quote, a poem....a recipe? Rosie Grant, the world's leading expert on gravestone recipes, explains all.
About Rosie Grant:
Rosie Grant is a writer, researcher, and archivist whose work explores the intersections of archives, folklore, and family storytelling. She is the creator of @GhostlyArchive, where her exploration of gravestone recipes and the histories behind them has reached hundreds of thousands of followers across social media. TO DIE FOR: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes is her first book.
Find her:
Instagram: @ghostly.archive
TikTok: @ghostlyarchive
Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list. [aff link]
Further Listening:
Sunday Roast Rites: on death and cooking
Moots: on the food related traditions of Hop-tu-Naa, the Manx celebration of Samhain
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Lecker is a podcast about how food shapes our lives. Recorded mostly in kitchens, each episode explores personal stories to examine our relationships with food – and each other.
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Full transcript available below
Lecker is part of Heritage Radio Network - heritageradionetwork.org
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
[00:00:00] You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.
[00:00:09] Rosie: And I remember even having this discussion with her as like a college student where I was like, well, food's not everything, right? Like there's some things that just doesn't like food and death. Shirley don't go together. And I was very wrong, obviously. It's funny now to be here.
[00:00:25] Lucy: This is Lecker, I'm Lucy Dear Love.
[00:00:31] I was walking through a graveyard in St. Leonard's this week, church in the wood in Hollington to be exact, approximately a hundred meters from where my favorite wild garlic spot lies. I would never gate keep. Anyway, having had the conversation with Rosie Grant that you're about to hear, I started paying close attention to the headstones around me.
[00:00:51] It is mid-November and the church yard is almost entirely blanketed with ru oak leaves, covering paths and plots like most graveyards I've ever been to in this country, there's a general air of austerity broken only by a rare flash of color in the odd floral display. Stones bear names and dates are not much else though the line taken suddenly from us referring to someone my age when he died, catches my breath in my throat.
[00:01:24] It got me thinking about our cultural traditions relating to death. And if we or our family do choose to set in stone literally our legacy, what are the words that can sum up our lives?
[00:01:40] As you'll hear, Rosie Grant's life has long been entwined with cemeteries.
[00:01:44] Rosie: My parents are both ghost tour guides, like Historic Ghost Tour Guides in Alexandria, Virginia. I think growing up we just loved going to cemeteries. We went on plenty of tours. We didn't like fly to a lot of places to travel as kids.
[00:01:59] We would just, we would go to cities nearby and we would always take the ghost tour. And when I was in high school, I would actually walk through a cemetery to do a shortcut from my high house to the high school. And so I always found them very peaceful places and very beautiful. And they were just, I don't know, just very contemplative and lovely.
[00:02:18] And the one that I walked through from my high school. I had neighbors buried there and names that I was familiar with.
[00:02:26] Lucy: Now, in a way, Rosie has taken up the family tradition, although with a different form of afterlife, custodianship.
[00:02:34] Rosie: I was doing a, a library science degree at the University of Maryland, my MLIS, and I had to do an internship at a library or an archive.
[00:02:44] This is in 2021, so most places were. Temporarily closed. 'cause of the pandemic we're at least not bringing in new people. So a lot of internships were paused, but unfortunately, cemeteries were busier than ever. And so I interned in the archives of Congressional Cemetery in Washington dc. I basically, as a cemetery CVEs intern.
[00:03:08] It was a lot of just documenting gravestones, geolocating them, and creating these little mini tours for some of the more. Famous residents who were buried there and had, you know, these very illustrious lives and interconnected in different places around Washington DC And so that was kind of my like intro to the death industry, how all of that worked.
[00:03:29] Lucy: As part of the course, Rosie took a module where they sort of looked at how social media could be an archival tool. She'll explain a bit more about that. Did she know, but her life was about to change forever. So I was
[00:03:44] Rosie: taking, uh, this class that was basically like a data science class, and it was how social media works and how platforms works, and it was very like network theory.
[00:03:54] And so in the beginning it was very heady, but we had to create a fresh account to. Test out what we were learning. And so my professor had said, you know, pick a niche and post every day for about three months about whatever that niche is. And she had recommended to me and she was like, why don't you make it about your cemetery internship?
[00:04:11] And I was like, is there an audience for that? And she's like, there's an audience for everything. And she was very right. Rosie's account ghostly Archive
[00:04:19] Lucy: now has over 200,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram.
[00:04:23] Rosie: There's a huge audience of cemetery lovers online, huge Facebook groups dedicated to cemetery enthusiasts, people who love the art.
[00:04:32] There's all of these, like you know, you can find cemeteries of Mississippi or Cemeteries of London, or different types of cemeteries. And so it was very eye-opening to me of like how all of these groups are just so in love and most of it is people who care about history and preservation and a lot of gravestone cleaners.
[00:04:53] And so I got added eventually to this cohort of cemetery talkers, which is funny that there's a whole group of us. Most of them gravestone cleaners, the biggest of us are gravestone cleaners, and they just tell stories and they teach people like how to take care of people in your local cemetery, proper stone cleaning, that sort of thing.
[00:05:13] Some of the other ones are tour guides, like their historic tour guides, and they're just telling the stories of folks from their city.
[00:05:19] Lucy: And Rosie then uncovered a niche within her niche, which there absolutely was an audience for too. My
[00:05:26] Rosie: internship that ended and I was just. Still very interested in.
[00:05:30] Gravestones. I was just like, for me it's just inspired something of, so I started featuring people outside of my cemetery. Washington DC has a lot of unusual markers. Even Baltimore, Virginia, kind of the area. There's just a lot of really interesting cemeteries and so I was still researching people and just.
[00:05:49] Coming across them, honestly, going on lots of walks. It was still the pandemic, so lots of walks in cemeteries, and I learned about the first Graves Gen recipe, which is a woman named Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson. Buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, and she has just this beautiful headstone.
[00:06:07] It looks like an open cookbook on a pedestal, like as if you would go into your kitchen and just read it off. And it's the ingredients for her spritz cookie recipe. And I saw it online on this website called Atlas Obscura, which is a really wonderful source for just. Off the beaten path things, they're well researched.
[00:06:25] Lots of good gravestone and cemetery stories are on it. And so when, you know, I saw hers online, I was like, oh, I wonder what these cookies taste like. They're on a gravestone. And it was very much of like, you know, we were all home during the pan. This is such a pandemic experience of we were all home cooking or we were social distancing.
[00:06:43] For me, I was walking in cemeteries a lot 'cause it was an easy place to just be outside, especially when you live in a city. And I was. Just curious what these cookies tasted like. So I posted it on TikTok and I was so surprised it went viral in a way that I was honestly, at first, a little surprised by plenty of people commenting things like I, you know, what would I put on my gravestone?
[00:07:05] I didn't know you could do this. Like you can put a recipe into it, like that's an option. This is such a good idea. But then there was also these folks who were posting things like, you know, my mom just died and I make her cake that she made for me every birthday, and I still make it. To remember her and it tastes like when we were together in the kitchen, just a lot of like very personal food and death experiences from random people on the internet.
[00:07:31] It was very personal and beautiful. So in my mind I was like, oh my gosh. Like I had never seen the two together and it just, it was an aha moment of like, wow, wait. Food can do that for us. That's amazing. So the
[00:07:45] Lucy: rest, as they say, was history. Naomi, Odessa, Miller, Dawson's Spritz Cookies were just the beginning really.
[00:07:52] Rosie started researching and posting stories about different recipes that she'd learned about on gravestones all over North America, and she kind of became the gravestone recipes lady. If you've ever stumbled across a TikTok on this topic, it's most likely hers. I'm so drawn to Rosie's work and also this general idea of a recipe on a gravestone, and there's loads of reasons for this, but I suppose the main one is that through an interest in domesticity, as regular listeners will know, and also the unrecorded of what is often women's work in the home kitchen.
[00:08:25] I'm both fascinated and really touched by this particular type of
[00:08:30] Rosie: immortal. There's a woman named Deb Nelson who's buried in Iowa. She was a local radio dj, like a very popular local small town celebrity like her daughter talked about. She would go into the grocery store and it would be like a two hour affair.
[00:08:47] 'cause everyone wanted to like chit chat with her and she was like. She just made time for everybody and she would host these epic Halloween parties and incredible costumes, really good food. She was like everyone's favorite neighborhood mom, and she would make this cheese dip every Christmas and give it out to people as gifts with a sleeve of crackers, and you had to return your jar the next.
[00:09:08] You know, by the next year, so you would be re-gifted with the new jars and if you didn't return your jar, you might not get the cheese dip. So it was a fun trade off and she was always very secretive about the recipe. I never gave it out in life. And folks would ask for it and people in her community would be like, you know, like we wanna have your cheese dip more often.
[00:09:27] And then Christmas time like, can you give it to us? And she's like, you can have it basically at my funeral. Or it's a very like that joke of like have it over my dead body sort of thing. But then when she passed away, her family was trying to think of like, how do we represent our mom? This like huge, larger than life person.
[00:09:44] Everyone loved her so much. And they decided to put her cheese dip recipe a little bit because they were like, well, this is kind of what mom was always saying to us. And it's a good, it's a cold cheese dip that you would take crackers, clubhouse crackers, and dip it in and it's really good.
[00:10:02] Lucy: As you might have guessed simply from the level of detail in the story she just told.
[00:10:08] Rosie's involvement in the gravestone recipes didn't end with simply reading about them and posting about them. Oh, no. For each recipe she learned about, she would make the dish herself and then she would actually visit the gravestone, taking some of the food she'd made to eat and tribute to the person.
[00:10:25] And that's how the book came about. 40 of the recipes Rosie found have just been published as To Die for a Cookbook of Gravestone recipes. And a really important part of the process of the writing of the book was to include the story of the person themselves. And this involved Rosie having extensive conversations and visits with the family to understand and to be able to painstakingly retell the intimate detail and intricate minutiae of these people's lives.
[00:10:56] Rosie: Yeah, I mean, that was definitely the most like labor intensive, but easily the most rewarding. I mean, I think that that really was the book more than just like. Obviously documenting the recipes. And I think when I first met in the beginning, this all came out, so I guess organically and randomly, like I made Naomi's cookies.
[00:11:15] I was researching more about her just 'cause I was like, who is who? How would you decide to do something like this? And I learned about a woman named Kay who had a FUD recipe in Iowa home named Maxine who had Christmas cookies. And it just kind of, there kept being more of them. And when I was at about.
[00:11:32] 20 rest would be, no, maybe 15 at this point. So still pretty early on. And most of these were, I found on the internet. They'd been featured in local news, blog posts, social media, just different. All over the place. And it was around then that I met with Naomi's family. Her son Richard and Granddaughter Nala came up to New York and we all met there.
[00:11:52] We made her cookies together. And Richard was talking about all of these stories of like waiting in the kitchen as a kid for the cookies to come out and tasting them and just like really funny tidbits about his mother. And it felt like, oh, the recipe is just the surface level. Like it's a great recipe.
[00:12:09] It's a really good cookie, but like. There are so many more, there's such a depth to it that's very human that like I could relate to and I was like, wait, I need to do this for everyone. And a little bit of this was born out of these community archives principles of like if I was going to be cooking the recipe, especially because there's the social media side, then like I needed to talk to the family, of course get permission and so.
[00:12:34] As people would send me their recipes, I would kind of turn into this, like this is my library inside of like, I have this like whole data dump. I have like this huge Google map of where everyone is, just to kind of get a sense of like, who's doing this? Where is this happening? What types of people are deciding to do this?
[00:12:52] And then reaching out to the families, of course, for permission to be like, could they include them in this? And then eventually that turned into oral histories. I had. Maybe 80 to a hundred interviews with family members and friends of the person and, you know, creating a transcript. And this is very the boring librarian side, where I was like, I, I need to like get all the information, comb through it, write the story, and then send it back to each of the families.
[00:13:17] And in the stories of each person were so beautiful of like, they were these community centers, they were just doing the labor of love. And I remember hearing someone saying like, you know. We can celebrate these external accomplishments like a big job or you're famous or like any of these other things.
[00:13:36] But then on the flip side, there's these people who were like, they were very famous in their local town or community, and they hosted all the holidays. They were the ones who made your birthday really special. And like there's a true labor to it. And they were very missed. Like pretty much everyone has said after they passed away, they're like.
[00:13:55] Well, who's gonna make my birthday special? Because like they did a really good job of that. And I think while I was doing all of this, I was extra reflective. Both of my grandmothers passed away during COVID and you know, they were huge matriarchs. They were very influential in my life. I lived with them.
[00:14:12] I lived with one of them for one time, and the other one was like very encouraging for me to like go to college, be an English major, study what I wanted to study. And so I think. The loss of both of them while talking to the families of like, how do I remember someone And I really want, like, I want them with me.
[00:14:29] I want the memories preserved. And that's done so fully through food. And like, it doesn't have to be, they don't, none of them were fancy cooks. Like this wasn't, one of my grandmothers was actually like a very, she loved a Julia child. Like more, more ingredients, more seafoody. Um, but the other one who I like very much love her food was like.
[00:14:50] Box cake, potatoes, meat. She was an Irish immigrant in the US and it was just like very simple food that when I eat it, I remember her. And so it it very much like seeing how all of these families decided to use food to commemorate their person and just share their legacy. It really wrapped it all together for me.
[00:15:10] Lucy: Yeah, I think I was really struck by kind of what you were, you were talking about there that these things that history doesn't normally document or celebrate, but it's these details that kind of make a life real and meaningful. And it felt so beautiful to read those about these people that I've never met and that I never will meet, but their were, their stories are still worthy of, you know, being put in a book, I guess.
[00:15:48] I am curious about. Your relationship with recipes in general? I mean, you mentioned your grandma's both having a big influence on what you eat, but before you started this project, what was your relationship with food and cooking and recipes like?
[00:16:02] Rosie: I would definitely say that I was a better eater than cook.
[00:16:07] Like I love food. I was an English major in college and I did a creative writing minor, and in my creative writing classes, I focused on food writing. I took this one particular food writing with this incredible professor named Erica Kavanaugh, who she really just for her food was connected to everything and that was very inspirational to me.
[00:16:26] And I remember even. Having this discussion with her as like a college student where I was like, well, food's not everything. Right? Like there's some things that just doesn't, like food and death surely don't go together. And I was very wrong. Obviously it's funny now to be here. So connected to food and death.
[00:16:43] Yeah, I mean I love food memoirs and I have done creative writing workshops and like food I just find as a very, it's a nice focal point. And so that was really, it transitioned so seamlessly when starting to do this in the sense of like. How we use food to remember a person who came before us and like put, I mean I'm coming up in like American Western traditions where like food and taboo and cemeteries are like, these are, these do not connect, but there are plenty of other places.
[00:17:12] I mean I live in Los Angeles now where Dia de Los Martos I is very connected to food and family and going to the cemetery and creating these altars and like plenty of other traditions. And cultures of food and death being a lot more melded together. And so I think that's been really lovely. I've also started taking more cemetery history classes and the first American parks, like American public parks were cemeteries and people would go to them on the weekends and they were called rural cemeteries.
[00:17:42] And you know, of course we began first with church yards and like these very small burial spaces connected to them around different cities and spaces. And then as cities grew, they needed a place for people to like. A put the dead. It was like a sanitary thing. But then they tried to make it like a little bit of a well marketing thing of like, come out here, we have beautiful spaces.
[00:18:02] It's luscious greenery. You can visit your deceased relative, but you can also picnic here and just spend the whole day wandering around the cemetery. Greenwood where Naomi is buried was one of those places. It was a traditional space welcoming people from outside of the city. And so it's very funny now to like be here and we're back in the stage of like, oh, you can't bring food into a cemetery.
[00:18:25] And of course there are very good cemetery guidelines of like, don't leave food clean up after everything. We don't want animals to like harm the gravestone or anything, but of just going and, and having a bite of something and thinking about a person. It's part of an older tradition.
[00:18:42] Lucy: I was so glad Rosie brought this up because reading the book had got me thinking about my own cultural traditions around death and food.
[00:18:50] And I have to say, as a person whose family history is pretty implacably rooted, nowhere further afield than Northeast England, these traditions. Aside from the customary sandwiches and scones at the wake, a pretty non-existent, I did rifle through the pages of my old favorite tome at the encyclopedia of superstitions in search of practices around death and food, and found things like throwing out all fresh food in the house the day someone dies, along with stopping the clocks and also taking a portion of the food served at the funeral to the grave so that the deceased can join in the feast.
[00:19:24] I really like the idea of the latter. You know, it's kind of similar to what Rosie was talking about before, but I've never done any of this personally or heard anyone talking about doing them. I realized while doing some research before the interview that I couldn't find a single example of a recipe on a gravestone in the uk.
[00:19:42] Interesting. No, but then walking around the cemetery in St. Leonard's meant that this actually didn't seem that surprising. We don't really go in for. Interesting grave inscriptions, just pure solemnity all the way. I wondered whether Rosie had encountered any examples of gravestone recipes outside of North America.
[00:20:04] Rosie: I mean, at this point, I, and one of the reasons why actually I love doing different interviews is that I get the sample. Or even just like colloquially hear from people of like Australia, China, Brazil, Peru, like just pinpoints of people from all over the world. And generally that's that is what I hear, is like, I've never heard of this before.
[00:20:25] Elsewhere. I'm very lucky that my husband was a computer science person, so he helped me set up some. Search terms and we have algorithms and I, I basically, I'm now just like a crazy person on the data of gravestone recipes. So yeah, to my knowledge, at least on the internet, I've not learned of any in Europe actually until very recently.
[00:20:45] I just learned in my very first one in Amsterdam and I haven't researched it. That'll be a part two for the book. If, if I, you know, can learn and get the permission from the families, we'll see how they feel. I do get a lot of cryptic messages from people like. Hey, I hear you're interested in this. Do you know about this one in this place?
[00:21:02] But yeah, as far as I know in the uk I don't know of any. And I think from, again, very colloquially, I think some cemeteries have a little bit more requirements of like what can go into a gravestone. It does seem to be cemetery per cemetery of how. You know what's allowed to go on, what's not allowed to go on.
[00:21:20] That might even come into the gravestone carver too. In most North American cemeteries, unless you are at a military cemetery, you can kind of put anything. I was even chatting with Greenwood of like, do you have any rules of what? Can't go onto a gravestone? And they're like, as long as the gravestone takes up the plot that you purchased, so you purchased a space of land, as long as it's within that area, you can kind of do whatever they're like.
[00:21:45] We do review all gravestones just to make sure it's not like dangerous, and it's not like anything insulting like you don't wanna be like. Ing your next door neighbor or something like that. You don't want it to be upsetting to other mourners or people coming by. Some people do get creative with like inside jokes and stuff like that, but for the most part it's like, you know, QR codes, photos, anything goes.
[00:22:08] I think a lot of gravestone. Carver and people who work in monument making, there are some companies that are more traditional that say like, you know, you have this much space, you can do these many things on it. And then I've talked to some, there's this one woman in Minneapolis who she like helps the families carve themself.
[00:22:26] She gives them like a lesson. So you are helping, whether it's for yourself or a loved one, like. When I was there, she was helping a woman carve her mother's gravestone and her mom fed squirrels every day. And so like, she got to do like a little bit of handwriting on it. And then the, the stone mason, like she was like doing an actual, this like replica of the squirrel that her mother would feed.
[00:22:48] So like it's very involved and very personalized for making a monument to your person. All that going to said, again, it's mostly there's, I should say there are two gravestones in the Middle East that have a recipe, but everyone outside of that, there are two in Canada that I know of. I've just heard a rumor of a third one in Canada.
[00:23:08] And of course like, you know, these are all crowdsourced. I only know about. Ones as they come my way.
[00:23:14] Lucy: I wondered whether Rosie had noticed any patterns in the locations of the recipe gravestone she's found within the us. Did one stone in one place make it more likely you'd find others? And does she think it speaks to a country specific relationship with legacy?
[00:23:29] Rosie: Again, I know much less about other countries outside of North America like burial trends, but what I can say is in the US as, or I should say North America, 'cause Canada's like this too. The technology has changed quite a lot in the last, you know, 50 years. So of our historic cemeteries, you know, it used to be wood and then that would just go away, and then we moved to marble.
[00:23:52] And marble is beautiful but quite soft, and it just eventually disintegrates in one person's lifetime. And then now we have the tools to do granite. And granite is, you know, very hard. It'll last a while. And so you can get a little bit more creative with the carving and. It's like interesting. Now, if you go to like some of the older cemeteries, like such as the New England, they all look very similar because there was one family, first one family, and then it, you know.
[00:24:18] Got larger and larger, but there was this family in Boston that would carve everyone's gravestones. And so they all kind of looked the same. 'cause it's basically, they would make a bunch of versions and then just add people's names later and ship them off all over. And then nowadays, like we have the tools in technology and I do think like there is something of, of course it's, it's not only like we have the tools to, but people are allowed to do this of, and it's, if anything, maybe a little bit more accepted and celebrated of like, this is a really.
[00:24:47] A tough time. You've lost someone, you've lost a parent, you've lost a friend, you've lost a sibling. As like, we're grieving and we are trying to, you know, preserve some sort of legacy of the person in a, a, a stone. Like it's, it almost feels impossible. And I feel like for that reason, like for my own grandparents, you know, we have their names.
[00:25:07] We have an Irish cross and we have their birth dates and death dates, and it's just like, it keeps it easy, keeps it clean. It's nice and traditional. But I do think more and more people are starting to think about these things of like, I want people to walk by in a cemetery and read my name and you know, laugh at an inside joke or an interesting poem, or things like that.
[00:25:27] I mean, it does kind of have an American flare of just being like. Well, remember me, please remember me. There's this phrase of, you know, you die two times when you actually die the first time, and then the second is the last time someone says your name. And cemeteries are just these public spaces to remember someone who has passed away.
[00:25:48] Lucy: I've heard this before, the idea of the two deaths, but it just felt really poignant at this point to have Rosie remind me of it.
[00:25:58] But the recipes on the gravestones are notable for other reasons too. If you read the actual original recipes that on the photos that Rosie posts in online or includes in her book, they're not written like the recipes in a professional cookbook, why would they be? That's not how we document our own recipes in our kitchen notebooks, in our messages to friends in scraps of paper on the fridge, or even in community cookbooks.
[00:26:23] In the book, Rosie depicts them as they exist on the stones, and she also provides a longer text version with kind of more developed instructions.
[00:26:32] Rosie: So I, I love community cookbooks and that became a thing that I started collecting while I was traveling to visit each person and document their stones.
[00:26:40] 'cause a lot of them were featured in different community cookbooks. The cover actually was also inspired by. Old vintage and community cookbooks, which was, I just find they're so beautiful and they're so, they're so rare. Like if you can get access to community cookbooks, it's such a time and place of different areas and the language that gets used or the shorthand that gets used pretty much every gravestone as I was cooking it.
[00:27:04] 'cause the first time I would cook it just would, I would follow exactly what I was seeing. And most of these recipes like spritz cookies, I had never heard of spritz cookies. Um, I didn't know what a cookie press was, and so I cooked it as I saw it and there's no instructions in Naomi's grave. So I made it like sugar cookies.
[00:27:21] And you know, the dough was great. It was still like a lovely cookie, but it's not her cookie. So of course, you know, learning about spritz cookies, I now own four cookie presses and I learned that she liked the tree shape and so. The main process was of course, like making it, sending photos to the family, and in some cases I cooked with the family.
[00:27:39] So that was the best case scenario. When it came to like editorializing it, uh, there was I think an impulse from some of the food editors reviewing it, being like, oh, we don't, that's not how we cook things anymore. We don't really, we wanna take this part out. And I was like, I think we have to keep it, unless the family changes it, we're not gonna change it.
[00:28:00] You know, margarine is used in quite a few of the recipes, and Americans right now are like margarine's, just like not a, a popular ingredient anymore. You can still access it and find it, but it's just not very common as much as it used to be. And some of the families were like, yeah, no, we've updated it to butter.
[00:28:16] The recipe's even better. She updated it eventually, but some of the other ones, they're like, no, you have to use margarine. Like that is what her recipe was. So I was like, okay, we're using margarine then. Like that's what she says. So I think like the instruction side of it too would do a lot of working of like, we would add details as how the family described it, but we didn't wanna add details to make a different, like the goal was to, so if people should be interested in trying these recipes from a gravestone, the end result, the goal is to have it as close to what they would've made.
[00:28:48] So we weren't trying to like perfect it or update it or have like a new twist on it. Like we were just trying to document it and then help explain it through for someone who maybe, you know, didn't know what sifting is or what creamy, you know, things like that were just to kinda get us there. I think the hardest recipe for me was the fudge recipe.
[00:29:07] I had never made fudge before and like if you were to make modern fudge, at least in the US there are certain ingredients. And tools that you would use. So like I was able to do it if I like sort of cheated my way out of like, I used evaporated milk, I used a candy thermometer. But then talking with the family, they're like, she used 2% milk, which is much harder to get to the softball stage.
[00:29:28] She also wouldn't use a candy thermometer. She just knew how to whip it into a way and then let it, you know. You put it out on the marble slap and then you let it dry, basically. And it worked really well for her. After 30 plus years of making this, me making it in my kitchen, I was just like, how the heck?
[00:29:47] So it took like a lot. We, we must have remade that recipe like 50 times to try to get it as close. And I still think like. She had the technique to be able to do it perfectly well, that maybe someone like me who's a lot more newer to this will still struggle with, but the goal was to not change anything
[00:30:06] Music: that they had.
[00:30:40] Totally.
[00:30:41] Rosie: I mean, cooking is such a, there's the chemistry side, there's the communal side, and I think, I mean this. The sort of driving ethos of this project was as a community archive of like, I, I mean, I love food, but I'm not a chef. I'm not a professional baker. I'm sure there, you know, this, this project was meant to document these and share the stories and kind of these legacies of each person, and that's why I asserted out the book after the introduction of like, why am I doing this?
[00:31:07] What are some cemetery terms? But then it is to document your own recipes in your own personal archive of like. What ingredients do you use and why do you use them? Like why do you eat what you eat? Did you inherit these things? Is it because it's what's available to you? If I were talking to people who were like, oh, I wish you had more recipes, or, I wish you had a bigger variety of like, it's a gravestone archive, like there's, it is what it is that's on there.
[00:31:33] If you wanna Google a recipe, you can get a fantastic chocolate chip recipe. Like we have the internet, we can get recipes. I got one message from a person like three days after the book came out and she was like. Because there's two chocolate chip cookie recipes. I mean, even if, if every single recipe happened to be a chocolate chip cookie recipe and a variation, I would've made a gravestone recipe book with all chocolate chip cookie recipes.
[00:31:55] Like I, I just think the whole thing is so interesting of, like, that to me would be a whole. Other universe of them. I think what this meant to be is a little bit more deeper than that of like, what are your recipes? What did you grow up with? It doesn't have to be fancy, but like we each have that thing.
[00:32:11] It's a very personal thing of what we remember for ourselves and our families and our communities, and it's a little different for everybody of what that recipe is.
[00:32:22] Lucy: Something unexpected for me at least that the book gets into is that Rosie has actually started planning her own gravestone recipe.
[00:32:30] Rosie: So I recently just eloped with my, my husband, and we're buying a plot at Congressional Cemetery.
[00:32:37] And a little bit is just for the education of it, of like, you know, I'm in the space of like talking about cemeteries and death and Congressional is a urban cemetery in Washington DC It's very historic and they're running outta space like many other cemeteries around the country, especially in cities.
[00:32:54] And so I was like, well, I gotta get my space beforehand. And they do do pre-planning, meaning you can. Just be like buying a plot for the future for yourself at some point. So we are picking what location we want in the cemetery. Like, you know, I have a few favorite folks in different areas and I'm like, there's a guy who unfortunately died in the circus and the tiger that killed him got put under his gravestone, which I find like insane.
[00:33:19] But I was like, you know, do I wanna be the by the tiger guy? Do I wanna be by the flowers? They have an apiary with some really good cemetery honey. That you can like purchase that like supports the apiary itself. You know, do I wanna be by the apiary? So we're narrowing down what location we want. We're both young and healthy.
[00:33:38] We're in our thirties. Hopefully we will not use this for a long time, but. It's not like we're not gonna die someday, like, so that was kind of part of our impetus for that. And then, yes, it would. As far as the recipe currently right now, what I would do is a clam pasta or a clam linguini. I love home making my own pasta, and that's been a very fun thing since I moved to Los Angeles.
[00:34:01] I used Samine Naras, her pasta dough recipe, which was so good. I didn't know if I could like be like, check out Samme Naras, if I can fit that onto the gravestone. 'cause I really like her pasta dough recipe, but like hand cutting the noodles. It's one of my favorite things to do for small dinner parties with like two other friends, two to three other people, we have to hand cut our noodles together and then, you know, you boil them for just a couple of minutes.
[00:34:27] After letting them dry. And as far as the actual sauce, like I love clam based dishes. Clam dishes were my favorite as a kid. I find it a very nostalgic food. My dad would cook with clams. I just love the like brininess and like, honestly, you can do fresh clams. I'll even be crazy and do it with like canned clams, like in a pinch.
[00:34:48] I love it. Either way. No one's asking me for food advice. I just love it. And my husband's from Maine and loves also seafood based dishes. And it's one of these foods that for me, like really bridges of like when I was a kid to adulthood where like I'm hosting my own friends and family at my house and this is something I like to serve them.
[00:35:08] And a lot of it is like the preparation with guests there. So you're having a glass of wine, like we're all smelling and everyone's like. Cranking out the noodles and you have butter, you have white wine sauce, and that's cooking with the clams. You serve it with parsley, maybe some Parmesan cheese, and it's just delightful.
[00:35:25] I find it a very like pretty simple to make, like it'll fit onto the gravestone. That was another thing too of like some are recipes that I was like, I love making this, but I don't think it'll fit onto an epitaph. And so I think that's, I think
[00:35:39] Lucy: that's the one that I'm
[00:35:40] Rosie: picking in the
[00:35:41] Lucy: end. I loved hearing Rosie talk so animatedly about her favorite dish really allowed me to picture her at the table with friends, the hand rolling the spaghetti savoring the clam sauce that her dad had made.
[00:35:54] It's a reminder that a few words on a page or a stone can build an entire world in terms of the food that we eat and love. I mentioned that this section in the book had really made me think about what recipe I would put on my gravestone. Of course, Rosie asked me what it might be, and I obviously immediately panicked.
[00:36:14] Oh my gosh. I honestly don't know. I mean, it is tempting to do a baked good because I think there is something about, you know, making them to bring for people. I mean, I, you know, I am English, so a class A classic's, gone, love a Cheese, gone. Um, but I'm gonna have to think about this more. I feel like I'm not ready to decide.
[00:36:38] A cheese gone. I, yeah, I mean, I think definitely some more thought is needed here. I'm not even sure that I want to have a gravestone as I definitely don't want to be buried. I mean, I feel like this is a whole other podcast, let alone episode, but I think really, maybe I'd rather have a plaque on a seaside bench or something here.
[00:36:57] She poured the mushy peas on her chips because of course, there are a million different ways to preserve your legacy in death. I think we should end on one of my favorite examples, a story Rosie tells in the book alongside explaining that the restaurant critic Jonathan Gold's gravestone, inscription, reads tacos forever.
[00:37:18] Rosie: Julia Child is one of my favorite burials and she. Was cremated and her cremains were put in mixed with cement. And she's buried in an underwater cemetery off the coast of Florida. It's about a mile off. Um, and you have to go scuba diving to go visit her. So I would love to get my scuba certification someday and visit Julia Child's underwater.
[00:37:41] Like literally like the whole cemetery is underwater. It's called the Neptune Memorial Reef. And this idea is that like the. This cement that's building, coral can build around it. Fish can live in it, and it's meant to be a little bit more environmentally friendly, but she still has a memorial plaque to her saying, Julia, child fat gives things flavor.
[00:38:01] And I am obsessed with that one.
[00:38:19] Lucy: Lcca is hosted and produced by me, Lucy. Dear Love, thanks to Rosie Grant for being the guest on this episode. To Die for a Cookbook of Gravestone recipes is out now. And you can watch the videos where Rosie cooks these recipes and visits the stones on whatever your favorite social media platform is.
[00:38:38] She's at Ghostly Archive. Lcca is a part of Heritage Radio Network. You can find out more about the network and listen to other partner shows on their website. The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. Leika is an independent podcast, which is generously supported by listeners. If you enjoy what you hear and you're in a position to do so, you can sign up as a paid subscriber to support the work Leika does on substack, Patreon and Apple Podcasts.
[00:39:03] The links to those are in the show notes. Thanks as always to any paid subscribers listening here, you're my heroes. Thank you for your support and thanks to all of you for listening. I'll be back very soon.