The Guardian | 30.04.22 | SATURDAY | 15CUTTINGS
Experience
I bake recipes I fi nd
on gravestones
As told to Felix BazalgetteI
t all started during lockdown.
Like many people, I tried
baking for the fi rst time and
got a TikTok account. Less
commonly, I started learning
a lot about cemeteries. I’m
studying to be an archivist , and
when the pandemic began I had just
started an internship at Congressional
Cemetery in Washington D C , one of
the oldest cemeteries in the US.
Soon my interest became about
more than just work. During the
pandemic, my local ceme tery was
one of the few places I could go
for a daily walk and I began to see
how interesting cemeteries are as
repositories for history: you can
see how gravestone styles have
changed over the years, how diff erent
symbols have become more or lessbread, “no bake” cookies, Christmas
cookies, fudge and many others. As
I made more of the recipes and got
more feedback from everyone, I began
to understand how important cooking
is for people and for family histories.
My grandmother died from Covid ,
and making the gravestone recipes
made me think about this special
yellow cake she made for us grandkids
on our birthdays. It was so good. It’s
nice to think about the recipes that
hold a similar signifi cance for other
families – perhaps at gatherings
and holidays they know certain
dishes will show up. Cooking my
family recipes again is a way to bring
back those strong memories : when
I think of that cake, I remember my
grandmother and all the birthdays we
spent together.
Another more banal realisation
I had when we were preparing my
grandmother’s epitaph was that it is
very expensive to get words carved
into a gravestone. You pay by the
letter. Which must be why lots of
the gravestone recipes are so sparse.
The ones that have turned out best
for me are the more detailed ones –
the most recent is like a jam roll with
pecans and cinnamon. You just roll
it up and bake it, then slice it and
add powdered sugar. The gravestone
shared a detailed overview of the
process, which was helpful. I will
defi nitely be making that one again.
As well as learning to cook, I’ve
loved researching the lives of the
women behind the recipes – so far all
the gravestones with recipes that I’ve
found have been for women. There’s
been a Holocaust survivor; someone
who worked at the post offi ce her
whole life; and one woman in Alaska
who got the logo for the Cool Whip
imitation cream brand engraved on
her headstone.
The idea of selecting a stone is
terrifying to me – I don’t know how
I want the world to remember me
just yet. But for these women, the ir
recipe seemed like the perfect way
to connect with their families after
they’ d gone. And they wanted to share
it with everybody, which is beautiful.
My dream dinner party would be to
bring all these women together and
we would try all the recipes and get to
know one another. It would be a rich
dinner, though – they are all baking
recipes, comfort foods and desserts.
Rosie GrantDo you have an experience to share?
Email [email protected]A woman in Alaska
got a whipped
cream logo carved
on her headstone
‘So far, the recipes
have all been on
women’s graves’
Rosie Grant at Rock
Creek Cemetery in
Washington DCimportant, and also what kind of
information people choose to put on
their gravestones. In the past it was all
names and dates, genealogical stuff ,
but nowadays people like to add their
hobbies or something more personal
such as their sexual orientation.
I read online that some people had
even put their favourite recipe on
their gravestone, so one day I thought ,
why not combine all three of my new
lockdown hobbies and try to bake all
the gravestone recipes and show the
results on TikTok?
There are only about 10 so far that
I’ve found, mostly through searching
online. The fi rst one I tried was a spritz
cookie that was on a gravestone in New
York. The recipe was more like a list
of ingredients – one cup of margarine,
one egg, one teaspoon of vanilla. I hadto guess the process without really
knowing what a spritz cookie was. It
tasted OK, but more surprising was
how many people viewed my fi rst post- there’s the cemetery TikTok niche,
and the baking TikTok niche, but I was
the fi rst to bring these two audiences
together. What was nice was everyone
weighing in, saying, “ My grandmother
used to make this too” or the diff erent
ways their family made the recipe.
Since then I’ve made date and nut
Portrait: TJ Kirkpatrick