Meet The People Cooking Recipes Left By The Dead On Gravestones
Morbid question for a Tuesday, but have you ever considered what’ll happen when you die? If you’re as neurotic as me, you’ll have the whole thing planned out, where you’ll get buried, or where your ashes will be spread, what music you want played, the whole thing.
But I’m willing to take bets on no one reading this having thought of putting a recipe onto their gravestones. It’s definitely a bit… unusual but it’s something that people on TikTok have been documenting, as they’ve been coming across gravestones with delicious recipes inscribed on them.
Rosie Grant, a passionate cemetery expert, has shared a video where she says, “Two years ago, I learned about 23 people who’ve left a special recipe on their epitaph. Most of the graves belong to women and the recipes are for desserts.”
She shows clips of headstones with cute little recipe cards attached to the marble.
@ghostlyarchive Have visited 6 of the 23 gravestones, including the graves of Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson (spritz cookie recipe), Kay Andrews (fudge recipe), Constance Galberd (date and nute bread), Annabell Gunderson (snickerdoodle cookies), and Margaret Davis (blueberry pie). #gravestonerecipe#recipegravestone#cemeterytiktok#gravetok#recipesoftiktok#cemeteryexploring#recipeideas
♬ So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings - Caroline Polachek
She says that the kitsch, if slightly odd, addition to these graves changed how she feels about being remembered: “Gravestone recipes changed how I thought about death and ways to be memorialised.
“So I started making the recipes and bringing them to their grave sites.”
In the clip, she’s shown visiting the graves with the recipes and enjoying them alongside the person who wanted the recipes to be shared and passed on.
So far, she’s visited six of the 23 gravestones in the US with recipes on their headstones, including the graves of Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson (spritz cookie recipe), Kay Andrews (fudge recipe), Constance Galberd (date and nut bread), Annabell Gunderson (snickerdoodle cookies), and Margaret Davis (blueberry pie).
Grant’s followers were quick to chime in with comments about how adorable the idea is: “These people would love this so much. I’m tearing up,” said one. “Why did this make me cry?” shared another.
Some said it was a nice way to keep the recipes alive: “This is kind of beautiful to think about. A way to share them forward.”
And, we can’t go without sharing this slightly dark joke: “Recipes to die for.”
What recipe would you add to your headstone?