In a few cemeteries around the world, there are monuments (at least 35) etched with the usual name…date…but some include other elements.
Like a recipe. And Rosie Grant is working on a book about them.
In Logan, Utah, a granite headstone includes the recipe for Kay Andrews’ fudge. It starts with “2 squares chocolate” and ends with “pour into buttered pan.” Naomi Dawson’s monument includes her holiday sugar cookie recipe.
In Huntsville AL, there’s this monument in Maple Hill Cemetery I found with the recipe for Memaw’s No Bake Cookies:
Appreciated this in the Atlas Obscura piece:
“A grave shows what is important to you,” says Candi Cann, a religious studies professor at Baylor University who writes about the intersection of food and death traditions. According to Cann, recipes have come to serve as shorthand for love and nurturing. “If a recipe is a symbol of who you are, that means that you cared about having people over and feeding them and taking care of them.” In fact, Cann opens the anthology she edited, Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife, with a dedication to her late mother: “My recipe box is a shrine to you and to your memory.”
I make these cookies (my recipe here) — I grew up calling them boiled cookies — a few times a year since kids especially like these.
In Nome, Alaska, Bonnie’s monument is etched with a recipe and a likeness of a Cool Whip container.
Photographer Chantal Larochelle has this photograph of the late Debra Ann Nelson’s Red Lantern restaurant cheese dip which appears on her monument in Iowa along with other cemetery recipes.
Love this sweet legacy of sharing.
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