There’s just something about certain recipes that makes them a treasure — and not everyone is willing to let go of their formulas for culinary success. In the era of social media, in which one can find a tutorial to do pretty much anything, the expression “I’ll take the secret recipe to my grave” may seem to have become a bit obsolete. But nothing could be further from the truth. As shown by the book *To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes *by Rosie Grant, there are many people who find a way to literally bring their favorite recipes to their place of eternal rest, utilizing their own graves to explain step-by-steps for the dishes that brought them so many compliments in life. For posterity, to build a legacy, and above all, to allow others to continue preparing the recipe and in so doing, keep their spirits alive.

Grant spread the word of this phenomenon via Ghostly Archive, her profiles on Instagram and TikTok, where she provides documentation of cooking recipes she finds on graves in cemeteries around the United States. Once the food is ready, she takes a plate to the tomb of the cook in question, and eats what she’s prepared alongside them. The dish may be a carrot cake, cookies, a chicken soup or salsa ranchera. Because of concerns for space, the majority of the recipes Grant finds on graves are simple, and don’t have too many ingredients, and they don’t always include an explanation of what one must do with them. In those cases, she has to use a little imagination to carry them out.

In To Die For, Grant says that she’s always loved spending time in cemeteries. She grew up next to one in Alexandria, Virginia and her parents led ghost tours in their area, so she confesses that she feels pretty comfortable alongside a tomb. But it wasn’t until 2021, when she had to look for an internship to complete her master’s in library and information science, that she arrived at the Washington D.C. Congressional Cemetery. There, she learned about the site’s treasured archive and the many ways people choose to be remembered on their graves. She also became familiar with the death positive movement, which advocates for the benefits of speaking openly about dying as a way to break the taboos that surround it, and as a way to appreciate life. Shortly before this, Grant had discovered, thanks to a post on the Atlas Obscura website, that there were gravestones on which people had their favorite recipes engraved. Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s butter cookies, whose recipe is immortalized on a book-shaped gravestone in Brooklyn Cemetery, were her first find.

She recreated Miller-Dawson’s recipe, uploaded it to social media, and the response was overwhelming. Grant realized that one of the things that we most remember about our loved ones when they are no longer with us are their favorite dishes, and that “food has the power to connect us with those we’ve lost.” She began to research and discover other grave recipes throughout the country, and so began Ghostly Archive, and now her book. She says that in the United States, there is a certain tendency to put a “personal touch” on graves, hence some people opting to be remembered by their most-requested dish in life. All the recipes she’s included in the book are located nationally, though in a recent interview she said that she has an upcoming trip to a tomb in the Netherlands. It will be the first one that she visits in Europe.

To compile and prepare the recipes she included in the book, Grant first had to locate friends or family members of the deceased — though some of them did this work for her by reaching out to her first via social media. She wanted to ask for their permission to include the recipe, but also for their help with locating photographs and memories of their loved one in order to more faithfully recreate their dish. She writes that each recipe that is in the book is a window onto a life. Each grave, each dish, is as unique as the person behind it. And that every recipe that she shares exists thanks to the love of the families who have kept the memory of their loved ones alive.

The large part of the recipes one finds in To Die For are for cakes and cookies. Perhaps, says Grant, because they involve very clear instructions that can fit in an epitaph — or maybe because we all want to leave a sweet legacy behind, something that recalls happy, pleasant memories. Each one comes accompanied by a short text that allows the reader to learn more about the people behind the dishes: what they did for a living, what they loved, when they would typically prepare the recipe, what their relationship to the kitchen was like, and what role food played in their lives.

There are even a few people in the book who are still alive, but who already know which of their culinary fortes they’d like to leave for posterity. Such is the case of Peggy Neal, a woman who after the death of her husband, with whom she’d already planned a grave design, decided that hers needed to have her recipe for sugar cookies, always a hit among her family members and neighbors. Then there’s Cindy Clark-Newby, who already imagines kids passing by her tomb asking their parents to make them her oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies.

Although it can be read and used as a cookbook, it’s clear that *To Die For *is not your typical volume of recipes. The concept behind it draws directly from Grant’s background and her passion for archives, as well as from the legacy of community cookbooks so common to the United States. The recipes in such books are compiled by church groups, school or neighborhood organizations, fraternities, political groups or self-help groups, usually to raise funds for a good cause and are published modestly, without spending much money on page design or large print runs. Such books usually include simple recipes that reflect what was cooked in homes at a certain moment in time within their community, which is why they have enormous value that goes beyond that of the strictly culinary. As in Grant’s book, most of the recipes in such collections are contributed by women.

At the beginning of her pages, Grant also includes a few tips for learning how to document our families’ culinary legacies, underlining the importance of doing so no just as an act of nostalgia, but to understand who we are. She reminds the reader that when someone dies, it’s like losing a library, the answers to the questions you never asked, the story behind accidents that became speciality dishes, the reason why we make a certain cake on this or that occasion. All too often, our family’s culinary legacy is something we take for granted until it’s too late, and no one knows how to make Grandma’s famous croquettes.

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