A university researcher based in Los Angeles is gaining a growing following on her TikTok account where she visits gravestones with recipes and tries them out.
Rosie Grant, who considers herself a taphophile (a person who takes an interest in cemeteries, funerals and gravestones), says gravestone recipes are becoming popular in the US as a way to memorialise loved ones.
Photo: Rosie Grant
While she isn't the only one doing this, she is becoming well known on TikTok for it, with a couple of hundred thousand followers, millions of likes, and millions of views.
It is a fairly new phenomenon to put recipes on headstones, Grant says, although there have been food references for a long time.
"The oldest one [gravestone recipe] I've come across is just from 1994, so not particularly old and some of them are as recent as 2019. Generally, it's part of - at least in the US - a newer trend of gravestones getting very personalised."
Most are sweets and desserts like cookies, cakes, pies, but she's also spotted a few savoury dishes, like bread dips and chicken soup.
"My favourites are the ones I made most often ... Naomi Desmond Dawson, her spritz cookie recipe which is on her grave in Brooklyn, New York, I've made quite a lot.
"It was her son's idea [to put it on the gravestone] because .... she had actually never given her recipe away in real life, it was like truly a family secret. Her son would bring it to work, and his coworkers would be like these cookies are so good, can you give us the recipe? And he'd be like 'you can ask, but she's never going to give it to you'.
"And so it was kind of like a family joke that she literally took the recipe to her grave, but then of course very generously put that out for any passersby who happened to come across her gravestone. And yeah, it was something that she was proud of and people in her community knew her for [the cookies]."
But the challenge with these recipes is they often have little or no instructions.
"There's no instructions, it's just the ingredients for her cookies and I didn't know what a spritz cookie was, and I didn't know how long to cook them for so I made them kind of like sugar cookies. And all these people, when I posted it on TikTok, were like 'oh my gosh spritz cookies, my grandmother made that or my aunt makes that, you're supposed to use a cookie press'. And so I got a cookie press."
So the more detail, the better, but words are costly on headstones, Grant says. It appears people in the US are taking to obits to share their loved ones' more lengthy recipes. According to the Washington Post, between March 2020 and October 2021, 430 obits referencing casseroles were published in American newspapers and online obituary platforms, and the number of obituaries published on Legacy.com referencing casseroles rose by 43 percent.
Another one which Grant tried and turned heads on social media was Christine's carrot cake.
"Something I'd never seen before is she put pineapple in hers … some people like already knew this, they were like yes, that's like my secret ingredient is to put crushed pineapple in the carrot cake and a bunch of other people were similar to me being like I've never thought to do that before and it makes it so good. It also lasted because I travelled ... six hours to get to that grave."
Then there's the story of Martha Katherine 'Kay' Kirkham Andrews, who became famous for her fudge even before she died.
"At the time when the gravestone went up, she was still alive, and it made local news. So she even did interviews by her gravestone, which is amazing. She loved the local press that she got and she sounded like such a hoot. I wish I could have like known her," Grant tells Sunday Morning's Jim Mora.
"When I flew up there with my mom, when I was moving from DC to California, and we stopped at her gravesite and there was another family there eating her fudge, and we traded their fudge. And I was like, are you related to her? And they're like, no, we just every once in a while have a family outing ... And so like two families showing up and eating her fudge recipe and trading it together, it was like such a funny moment."
Grant says the treats have hit a sweet spot online with people who miss their loved ones and yearn for their baking. But it's not just about the food of course, as Grant explains, food, memory and death feel intertwined.
"A lot of people were just interacting in their own personal way, which was really impressive considering this is during the pandemic. I think we are a lot more aware of our own mortality collectively as a culture [than] we were used to.
"And so people [are] kind of grappling with a really complicated, painful topic in a very beautiful way of like, 'oh my gosh, my mom passed away, but she made this bread that I miss and I really wish that I could have my mom's banana bread' or whatever that was. We all have that recipe in our family that we connect to with the person regardless."
She too lost her grandmother during the pandemic but it was the memory of the yellow cake she made for all 32 of her grandchildren's birthdays every year that continues to bring a smile to their faces.
"We just missed it because like we missed those meals with her. And whenever I eat yellow cake now, I'm just like taking back to my 8-year-old birthday party, that she's serving it, as she did with my siblings and with my parents and it just brings me there with all of the senses and like the memory of her and the smells around her.
And there are many creative ways people are being remembered after they die. While interning at a Congressional cemetery, Grant realised just about anything can be on a gravestone these days.
"I live next to Hollywood Forever Cemetery in LA and someone's grave is covered with statues of dachshunds like little dogs. Someone else had like invented this really strange machine, so it's a photo of his machine. Other people have put like QR codes and you can literally use your phone and go to a website about the person, [which] I’m guessing a family member manages. Other people do like laser headstones, which is a pretty common thing, so they will laser-etch out a photo of the person."
She is trying to visit as many gravesites as she can, with the food she makes from them, and one day she hopes someone would do the same for her.
"Part of this project was my own awareness of ways people chose to be memorialised ... I think for myself, I have a clam linguine recipe that's my go-to and I would make it at dinner parties. I’ve recently got into home-making pasta. But probably that would be too complicated for a gravestone but at the very least a clam linguine and I really want to be buried in Congressional cemetery.
"I think a quote that I'd heard in a museum a while ago which was like you died two times; the first time you passed away, which is just you passing away and the second time was the last time someone says your name. And I feel like cemeteries are this place that like keeps your memory alive and like you walking through a cemetery and reading someone's name, there's a homage to that person [in doing that]."
