"Rosie Grant has always been familiar with death. Parents who led ghost tours, coupled with cutting through a cemetery on her route home from high school, helped her feel relatively comfortable with the topic. What she wasn't so familiar with were the recipes that found new life in death. In her new cookbook, "To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes," the L.A.-based archivist and social media personality dives into the world of tombstones etched with recipes that the deceased loved in life: a fan-favorite Texas sheet cake from a beautician, snickerdoodle cookies that helped feed California firefighters, guava cobbler that scented a Florida neighborhood. Grant is now sharing these recipes and the stories of those who made them in life."
""I think there's a lot of taboo around death, which is understandable," she said. "It's a scary concept that we will die, but I think what I like about gravestone recipes is, to me, it's very life-affirming. ... It's such a celebration of this person's life, and it embodies them hosting people. It's not just like, 'She liked baking,' or 'Cooking was her love,' or whatever. It's literally the ingredients to continue something forward of theirs, which also feels so for-the-living.""
Rosie Grant encountered gravestone recipes while working at the Congressional Cemetery during a pandemic internship and later compiled them into a cookbook titled To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. The cookbook collects tombstone-etched recipes and the personal stories of those who loved them, including a Texas sheet cake, snickerdoodles and guava cobbler. Grant views gravestone recipes as life-affirming rituals that celebrate a person's hospitality and allow loved ones to continue culinary traditions. Libraries and archives closed during COVID-19, but cemeteries remained open and busy, providing access to archival materials for research and collection.
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