A student from Los Angeles, who was tasked with creating a social media account from scratch, decided to mix two of her interests into one unlikely video series: cooking and cemeteries. She first found a recipe on a gravestone and baked it, and then another. Before long, recreating people’s favorite recipes, which are inscribed on their graves, became a beautiful way to share their memories.
With pandemic restrictions ongoing, she was also learning how to cook to pass the time.
So when she found her first recipe, written on the gravestone of Naomi Miller Dawson in Brooklyn, New York, she decided to give it a try.
“It wasn’t just that she liked cookies, it was the actual recipe,” Grant told The Epoch Times. “I think it’s beautiful. When you think of an old gravestone with just a name or a deed, and a quote or a symbol or something, it doesn’t say a whole lot about the person. A recipe says so much, and it’s such a gift to other people. It’s a way that you can continue sharing a memory of someone.”
“I didn’t know what a Spritz cookie press was,” Grant said. “A lot of people commented, ‘This is how you’re supposed to make Spritz cookies,’ which was so helpful. Other people have commented how their families would make a recipe, or what their family recipe is, like, ‘My grandmother used to make it with cinnamon,’ or ‘My aunt used to make this every single year.’”
Initially, Grant was just posting different parts of the cemetery on her account as she was learning about it. However, she didn’t know that sharing her interest in gravestone recipes on social media would have such an overwhelming response.
“People are commenting on what would be on their gravestone recipe,” she said. “It’s been a really cool thing just to see people’s reactions.”
Grant has tried 11 gravestone recipes so far, nine from gravestones in the United States and two from Israel. All the recipes are taken from the graves of women. The recipes have ranged from fudge, to cookies, to a surprising no-bake recipe.
Many omit instructions so Grant has to figure it out as she goes, with tips from her followers, but she concedes that all have tasted “really good” so far. Besides the Spritz cookies, Grant said her other favorite is a snickerdoodle cookie recipe, taken from the grave of a woman named Annabelle in California.
Through sharing her recipe recreations, Grant has been able to face her anxiety about death. “It’s not that we’re happy about death,” she said, “but we’re just thinking about these harder topics, like, ‘I’m gonna die someday.’ That’s tough, it’s a really scary topic for me, so I think my goal is to make it a little bit more comfortable. Recipes and food, it’s such a lively topic, and it’s an easier way to think about tougher topics.”
