Gravestone Recipes: Recipes Etched on Tombstones

 

This article with interview appears in The Mercury News! Scroll down for complete article link.

Archivist and TikTok creator Rosie Grant traveled the U.S. collecting the details and stories behind over 40 gravestone recipes. Interview to follow. 

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.

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 2021, 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 40-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.

Read more here. 

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/10/13/cooking-with-the-dead-to-die-for-tries-out-recipes-etched-on-tombstones/?share=iwaeuttdoor0odtchauw