“I’m going to start making recipes from gravestones,” she captioned the first TikTok video in the series. “There’s no instructions so I’m guessing a lot / if a sugar cookie and a shortbread cookie had a baby / they’re to die for.” Here’s how Grant went viral.
1 Eternal Recipes
Before she passed away and was buried next to her husband, Kathryn Andrews made sure her headstone in the Logan City Cemetery in Utah would feature her famous fudge recipe so that it could be handed down from generation to generation. ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb
Andrew’s headstone recipe is one of many that have appeared on gravestones across the US, honoring people who lived through the Great Depression and wanted their descendants to know how to make the perfect dish. One enthusiast is Grant, who works in the marketing department of the University of Maryland.
2 Delicious Desserts
Grant first came across a gravestone recipe when she saw a photograph of the last resting place of Naomi Miller-Dawson, who had a recipe for “Spritz Cookies” on her headstone. She started posting videos of herself making the gravestone recipes on TikTok channel @ghostlyarchive.
According to Grant, all have been by women, and all but one of the recipes (Red Lantern Cheese Dip, by Debra Ann Nelson) were desserts. “Just a few weeks ago, a woman reached out and her mother has a savory cheese dip recipe on her gravestone, which is so good,” Grant says.
3 Poetry Or Pie?
Washington public policy consultant Charlie McBride’s mother O’Neal Bogan “Peony” Watson died in 2005. While considering what to have on the headstone, McBride and his two daughters discussed what she would have liked best.
“Mom said maybe she wanted a little verse,” McBride mused. A funeral director who knew McBride’s late mother offered a better idea for the headstone. “He said, ‘Why don’t you put O’Neal’s Peach Cobbler Recipe on the tombstone?’” McBride says. “My daughters and I thought that was a smashing idea and we did.”
4 Learning to Bake
Grant says she has learned lots of bakery skills from trying out the recipes. “I think the spritz cookie is my favorite one to make,” Grant says. “They’re very pretty. They’re these cute little butter cookies… “I didn’t know what a spritz cookie was at first, so I cooked it kind of like a sugar cookie,” Grant says.
“People were recommending different ways to make the cookies, so I read through all the comments to understand how to make the cookies correctly and made it again and again.”
5 Live Forever
Grant points out that food and cooking are something very close to people’s hearts. “People will comment what they would want to put on their gravestone if they had to pick a recipe, or some people say things like, ‘Oh, snickerdoodles, my mom made it this way.’ And so there’s just this whole nostalgic connection, which has been really cool,” Grant says.
“When we’re in mourning, food is very comforting to us. These recipes feel like a more tactile, all-senses-included way to remember someone rather than only using your memory. But when you’re eating grandma’s special cake or cookie or whatever it is, you feel a little bit more connected to her.”
