Jill Petracek
Maxine’s Christmas cookies, immortalized over her body.
Debbie McNutt said she would only reveal her tea biscuit recipe “over her dead body”. And so it was — literally.
When she died in 2019, a victim of breast cancer, the teacher was buried with an unusual tombstone, as her family decided to take her promise literally. Instead of the traditional “Mother, companion, rest in peace”, the recipe for her cookies, famous throughout the city of Truro, Nova Scotia, was perpetuated where Debbie McNutt lies.
And this is how the flavors and affections of those who have already left live forever. Anyone who reads that recipe, either wants to make cookies, or immediately remembers the ones Debbie used to make, reveals Jennifer, the daughter, to . The bold idea wasn’t even yours: it was the deceased’s husband’s. “We laugh about it to this day,” says the couple’s daughter.
It’s not a unique case. Rosie Grant, researcher and active on TikTok, has already identified, from soups to cinnamon cookies, around 50 recipes in campas spread across the world. The researcher creating a compendium of recipes “to die for” — “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes”.
Grant created the project during his master’s degree in Information Sciences at the University of Maryland, between 2020 and 2022, while doing an internship at the Congressional Cemetery, in Washington, DC. The idea, which began as an academic one, quickly took on a life of its own.
“I had no idea there were so many personalized memorials. I thought it was beautiful — turns death into a celebration of life“, he explains. Thousands relate to and understand the engravings of recipes on tombstones. On social media, apparently, there are many who say that cooking family dishes helped them deal with the loss.
That’s why Rosie went looking for more “recipes to eat and die for more”.
He discovered, for example, the caramel recipe from Kay Andrews, in Utah, famous for having a spelling error (it’s a teaspoon of vanilla, instead of a teaspoon), and Christmas cookies from Maxine Menster, in Iowa.
Inspired by old Victorian customs, when families would picnic in cemeteries to “visit” loved ones, Grant began taking flowers and food to the graves. It’s an authentic “banquet for the dead”. Thus, he even got to know Naomi’s family, one of the “cooks” already six feet under the ground, and cook with them.
The author also began contacting family members of other people whose recipes she found. Some preferred to remain reserved; others opened the memory album and shared stories of meatloaf, sauces and cheese balls. From these meetings To Die For was born, the researcher’s book that mixes recipes, photographs and intimate portraits of lives interrupted.
Not all cases come from family members: some cooks decide, while still alive, what they want to leave inscribed. Peggy, for example, left in her will that she wants her sugar-laden cookies on her tombstone.
Eternalized recipes also take various forms: some are engraved on tombstones in the form of a book; others appear in small marble or ceramic slabs. There are some that just list the ingredients, without the preparation method.
“My children never met their grandmother, but this recipe keeps her alive”says Julia Gustafson, artist and owner of Two Rivers Monuments in Minnesota, recently recorded a recipe for lemon bars over her mother.
Rosie Grant encourages families to talk openly about how they want to be remembered, whether through words, symbols or flavors. She herself has already decided: she wants to record the recipe for her clam linguini.
