Pod Insights The Sporkful Why Would You Put A Recipe On Your Gravestone? About this episode Rosie Grant was already obsessed with cemeteries when she came across her first gravestone recipe. The headstone was carved into the shape of an open cookbook with a cookie recipe on it. Rosie made the cookies, posted about it on TikTok, and overnight she became the gravestone recipes lady.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dan Pashman? As we turn to fall and the weather starts to cool down, I think of things like crunching leaves. I think of sharing from the sidelines of a soccer game, walking the dog in the woods. And when I think of doing all those things, I'm usually wearing something from LL Bean. Whether it's my puffer vest, my puffer coat, my scarf, whatever you're doing outside this year, you probably need something from LL Bean, whether it's their boots, their Scotch plaid flannel, their rugged field coat, or more. Grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. As someone who has been lucky enough to go to Napa Valley, I can tell you, it's everything people say it is. Beautiful scenery, quaint, beautiful towns, and phenomenal food and
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1:09 Speaker 01 Serious XM Podcasts.
1:16 Speaker 02 Early gravestones were made out of wood, and that would eventually decay. And then they were made out of marble, and marble sort of falls apart. Now where it's being made out of granite, so it'll last a lot longer. That's very tough material.
1:28 Dan Pashman? I actually have granite countertops in my kitchen, and that's making me feel like I would like my actual granite countertops that I spend so much time standing over, where I cook all the meals for my family. I think maybe that's what my headstone should be. I want them to cut a rectangle out of the countertop. Now, there might be some food embedded in there, so maybe the analysts will get to it, but that's what I want my gravestone to be.
1:50 Speaker 02 That is so genius, and the first time I've heard someone say that, and I am obsessed with this idea.
1:55 Dan Pashman? That's a good reason to get granite countertops.
1:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, good investment. You're going to be using it for all time.
2:02 Dan Pashman? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Now, before we get into it, I have a quick, important announcement for all you pasta lovers out there. National Pasta Day is coming up, and my friends at Sfolini and I are celebrating with 20% off all their pastas. That includes my cascatelli, Vesuvio, and quattratini, plus all their others, even their brand-new bucatini. The sale runs from this Friday, October 17th, through Sunday, October 19th. There's no minimum. You don't need any code. Just go to sfolini.com for your 20% off. That's sfolini.com, S-F-O-G-L-I-N-I dot com. All right, on to the show.
2:45 Dan Pashman? It's October. Halloween's coming up. Of course, we're thinking about candy, but we're also seeing a lot of ghosts and skeletons and gravestones everywhere. So it's no accident, there's a new cookbook that just came out called "To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes." The author is Rosie Grant, and these gravestone recipes are her specialty. Now, when I say gravestone recipe, I mean gravestones, like in a cemetery, that have recipes written on them, instead of, or in addition to, a standard epitaph.
3:14 Speaker 02 If you walk through a modern cemetery in particular, you'll see literally anything that's important to the person will be reflected on a gravestone, or could be reflected. You might see what their hobbies were, what their pets' names were, a joke, like an inside family joke, QR codes, like, literally, anything can end up on a gravestone these days.
3:32 Dan Pashman? They put QR codes on gravestones now?
3:34 Speaker 02 Yes. It's the new thing.
3:37 Dan Pashman? That's commitment. I mean, it's funny, because like, you know, 20 years from now, I'm sure that we're gonna be like, "Ha-ha, QR codes!" But I guess, you know, whatever you're gonna put on your headstone is gonna be outdated eventually.
3:46 Speaker 02 I should even add, I've seen several QR codes, and all of the QR codes lead to a broken website, so, to your point.
3:53 Dan Pashman? That's the other thing, you know, your descendants have to remember to pay the annual fee for the URL.
3:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
3:59 Dan Pashman? Rosie has long had a fascination with cemeteries. She grew up near one and often walked through it on her way home from school. Her parents loved to take the family on ghost tours whenever they traveled, and her parents even became ghost tour guides when they retired. So it seems to run in the family. But it was by chance that Rosie ended up working in a cemetery and developing her current obsession. In 2021, while the pandemic was still raging, Rosie was in grad school, planning to become a librarian. One semester, she landed an internship with the Archives of the Congressional Cemetery in Washington DC, partly because it was just one of the only archives that kept its internship running during the pandemic.
4:34 Speaker 02 I didn't even know that cemeteries had archives. And so when I was walking around Congressional Cemetery where I interned, I was so struck by all the different types of markers. I was seeing like, you know, there's one gentleman who was killed by a tiger, and on his gravestone is a tiger, and it's supposed to be a replica of the thing that killed this guy who worked for the circus. There's another guy who worked for the Library of Congress, and his gravestone has the call number of his book and how you can find it at the Library of Congress. Other people put, you know, a famous poem that they loved. Like, it was just so many different things that I'd never seen before.
5:09 Dan Pashman? Right. But wait, if I got killed by a tiger, I wouldn't want to be like, "Let me give the tiger a prominent place on my headstone. He already killed you, now you're gonna give him top billing?"
5:18 Speaker 02 Exactly. Like, the tiger wins in every way. Why would you do this?
5:22 Dan Pashman? Yeah, seriously.
5:23 Speaker 02 And these are the questions that come up because, you know, sometimes these are the only times that a person has a public record to their name. So we're all thinking about this tiger guy just because his gravestone.
5:34 Dan Pashman? And it gets your imagination going of like, who was this person? What was their life like? You kind of start making it up in your head.
5:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's exactly that.
5:41 Dan Pashman? The same semester that Rosie was interning at the Congressional Cemetery, she was also taking a class that gave her an assignment. She had to start a social media account.
5:50 Speaker 02 And my professor was like, "Why don't you make it about your cemetery internship or about cemeteries in general?" And at the time, I was like, "I don't think there's an audience for that." And I was very wrong. There's a huge, huge cemetery audience, tons of huge Facebook accounts and Facebook groups dedicated to cemeteries. There's several cemetery TikToks. And so I eventually even joined this cohort of other cemetery TikTokers who all are on Grave Talk. They're posting about gravestones.
6:18 Dan Pashman? Is that what it's called Grave Talk?
6:19 Speaker 02 Grave Talk is like the hashtag niche within TikTok of cemetery TikTokers.
6:24 Dan Pashman? And what kinds of things are discussed on hashtag Grave Talk?
6:27 Speaker 02 Well, the biggest cemetery TikTokers are gravestone cleaners. They basically just do preservation work and they tell the story of the person they're cleaning the headstone of.
6:36 Speaker 03 This is the biggest stone I've ever cleaned by myself. It took me right around an hour. David died at the age of 50 in 1871.
6:43 Speaker 02 There's a couple of other people who are just like general historian. They like walk through different cemeteries and they tell the stories of these different places.
6:51 Dan Pashman? Rosie launched her TikTok documenting the gravestones at her internship. She called it Ghostly Archive. Even after that class assignment ended, she kept it going. Six months in, she expanded to focus on interesting grave markers at other cemeteries, anything outside the norm for a headstone.
7:06 Speaker 02 And that's how I learned about the first one.
7:08 Dan Pashman? When Rosie says the first one, she means the first headstone she heard of with a recipe on it.
7:15 Dan Pashman? This gravestone was at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, marking the grave of a woman named Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson. Rosie first heard about Naomi's gravestone from the website Atlas Obscura, which features lots of surprising and interesting places that are off the beaten path.
7:30 Speaker 02 So when you look at Naomi's gravestone, it looks like an open cookbook. It's like a book on a pedestal and...
7:35 Dan Pashman? The actual physical like cutting of the stone is shaped like an open book?
7:39 Speaker 02 It's shaped like an open book that's on like a pedestal. Like you might have like a cookbook out as you're reading it to cook in your kitchens and it just has her ingredients.
7:46 Dan Pashman? What was the recipe for?
7:48 Speaker 02 It was for her spritz cookies, which have you ever had a spritz cookie before?
7:51 Dan Pashman? What's a spritz cookie?
7:52 Speaker 02 Oh my goodness, they're these really beautiful buttery cookies. It almost looks like a sugar cookie, like in the ingredients. And you press it through a cookie press and I was just so curious what this recipe tasted like. If it's important enough to put onto their gravestone, this must be, this must be a pretty good cookie recipe, you know?
8:10 Dan Pashman? I should say, I looked it up. Spritz cookies get their name from the German word spritzen, which means to squirt, because the dough is pushed through a cookie press to give them the shape you want. So, anyway, Rosie went for it. She made the cookies. She put the process on TikTok.
8:23 Speaker 02 And I think virtually overnight, my world exploded.
8:27 Dan Pashman? Her video shows Naomi's gravestone recipe, then shows her as she's baking it.
8:32 Speaker 02 Naomi doesn't have instructions of how to make her cookies. It's just the ingredients.
8:36 Dan Pashman? Oh, so there's no temperature for the oven?
8:38 Speaker 02 Nope, no temperature, no mixing order. So I really just mixed up the ingredients and baked it. And all these people on TikTok were saying, oh, my gosh, my grandmother makes these. You need a cookie press because you press the dough through these really particular shapes. And it could be like holiday shapes or just these cool little swirls. And the way that the dough holds together, it actually maintains its shape really well. And, I mean, they're delicious. They're such good buttery cookies, especially when you pull them out of the oven and they're warm and like they melt on your tongue and they're so good.
9:11 Dan Pashman? Are they chewy or they're more like shortbread-y?
9:13 Speaker 02 They're more like shortbread-y.
9:14 Dan Pashman? That video of Rosie making the cookies racked up over a million views and hundreds of comments.
9:21 Dan Pashman? As she said, most comments were baking tips or their own memories of spritz cookies. But some of the comments alerted her to something else.
9:28 Speaker 02 I learned there were several other people who had also decided to do this. So that really kickstarted the whole project.
9:34 Dan Pashman? Over the next couple of months, Rosie scoured the web for pictures of gravestones with recipes and posted TikToks of her cooking them. Fudge from a gravestone in Utah. Date and nut bread from upstate New York. Nut roll from Israel.
9:46 Speaker 04 We're about to try a meatloaf recipe for the first time. This recipe comes from a woman named Beverly. She died and was buried in Texas.
9:54 Speaker 02 Once I got to 10, I was like, is this a thing? Like, this is so cool.
9:58 Dan Pashman? Are there certain types of recipes that are most common?
10:01 Speaker 02 Definitely cookies. I've heard before that cookies are pretty simple in instructions. And so it fits quite nicely onto a gravestone. You know, you only have so many characters, you only have so much space. It's also expensive, like per character, if you're paying that way. It adds up very quickly. And so it makes sense why Naomi would. Just put the ingredients and some of the other families as well. Like it's like a two line instruction.
10:24 Dan Pashman? Right. Is that how you pay for headstones? It's like per character?
10:27 Speaker 02 It depends on your area when you're, you know, buying a headstone. So some places you just pay for the space and then they give you however many words. But in some places you're paying per letter.
10:38 Dan Pashman? So there's an actual character limit on the headstones.
10:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. It's like a tweet.
10:42 Dan Pashman? Rosie's videos were getting more and more popular. She was being featured in places like the Washington Post, People, and a publication that I never miss, American Grave Stone Studies Quarterly. Making the recipes was really meaningful to her. It was a way to feel intimately connected to someone she'd never met. But Rosie wanted that connection to be deeper. She didn't just want to imagine people's stories. She wanted to learn about their real lives. So in 2022, Rosie decided to take her project to another level. Instead of pulling images from online, she would visit the gravestones herself. The first one she went to was the first one she heard about. Naomi in Brooklyn with the spritz cookies.
11:17 Speaker 02 Traditional things that I would think to bring to a grave in the past might be like flowers or, you know, there's a tradition of some people leaving a stone on top of a grave to show like I visited you. And so when I was thinking about what I was like, what type of flowers would she like? And then I was like, well, she did love these cookies. So what if I made the cookies and brought it sort of as like an offering to her gravestone? And so I brought it there and my mom came with me. And so we essentially had like an impromptu picnic. We enjoyed her spritz cookies at her grave.
11:45 Dan Pashman? But on her visit, Rosie wanted to take things a step further. She also planned to meet Naomi's family, to interview them about Naomi, and to bake the cookies with them.
11:53 Speaker 02 Nothing could compare with cooking it with her family and them telling the stories of, you know, waiting for the oven to heat up and then her pulling the warm cookies out and the cookies disappearing really quickly. And the holidays that she would make them for. And now their great grandson is the baker of the family.
12:09 Dan Pashman? Rosie also got to see where Naomi lived.
12:11 Speaker 02 She had grown up in Brooklyn and seeing, like, driving past the house that she used to live in, her multi-generational house, and seeing the restaurants in the area and then seeing Greenwood Cemetery itself. It kind of brought it all together of the person. The recipe basically was like the surface level part of these deeper stories about a person. And so after Naomi, I visited first three people and then four people. It wasn't just going to the cemetery, it was also going to the local diner that they would go to on the weekends, or the post office that they worked at, or the trail that they would hike on. And so it just brought so many more details out. And so I think by the 10th recipe that I visited, and in some cases also met with the family and cooked
12:55 Speaker 02 with them, I was like, I think I have to do this for everybody.
13:00 Dan Pashman? Coming up after the break, Rosie's TikTok project brings her to one of the most remote places in the US. And we tracked down a person with a recipe on their own gravestone, and we talked to them. Stick around.
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16:05 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, bestselling cookbook author Jake Cohen and chef and TV host Vivian Howard joined me in the salad spinner to discuss the biggest and buzziest food stories of the moment, including a mayo-themed wedding paid for by Hellmann's and officiated by their mascot. Viv, would you have a mayo-based wedding?
16:24 Speaker 04 Absolutely. Yep. And if it were offered to me, I'd find someone to marry.
16:31 Dan Pashman? I got you.
16:31 Speaker 05 I got you, girl. You know, the only thing I'll take away from that is I will definitely be having a four-foot chicken finger tower at my next wedding, if it happens.
16:44 Dan Pashman? We also cover Taylor Swift's signature cocktail, the chicken tender's renaissance, and why Chili's is having a moment. That one's up now. Check it out. All right, back to gravestone recipes. The first graves that Rosie Grant visited were in New York. Then she moved to California, and on her way across the country, she stopped at another grave in Utah. Once she arrived in California, she visited cemeteries there, too. She was knocking the easy ones off her list. Then came a test of her commitment. She wanted to visit a gravestone in Nome, Alaska. Now, you might have heard of Nome because it's the end of the Iditarod, but even for Alaska, Nome is remote. The only way to get there, besides by dog sled, is to fly.
17:21 Speaker 01 Yes, you cannot drive there. There's no road. Yeah, they haven't built a road. They said when I was in grade school, they said, oh, there will be a road, but there's never.
17:30 Dan Pashman? This is Julie Chek, the daughter of Bonnie Rainey Johnson. Bonnie raised Julie in Nome, and now Bonnie is buried there.
17:39 Dan Pashman? Bonnie Rainey was born in 1935 in Washington State. By the time she was a teenager, she wanted out.
17:45 Speaker 01 She just drove to Alaska on the Alkan Highway and...
17:49 Dan Pashman? And never, never came back?
17:51 Speaker 01 Never going back. Back in the day before Alaska was a state, she married a constable, and then they traveled around Alaska, and that's how she ended up in Nome.
18:01 Dan Pashman? Bonnie eventually got divorced. She raised four kids on her own. I haven't been to Alaska, but I kind of get the impression that Alaskans are their own special breed. Like, the kind of person who would move up to Alaska at age 18 in the 1950-something, when it wasn't even a US state. It says something about that person.
18:19 Speaker 01 Yes, oh, definitely. She was very independent. She just wanted to do something different. She loved Alaska.
18:25 Dan Pashman? Once Bonnie settled there, she developed very Alaska hobbies. She loved wildflowers and searching for sea glass on the Bering Sea. She passed that love of the outdoors on to her children. They'd pick wild Alaskan blueberries, which she then used to make blueberry pie.
18:38 Speaker 01 Oh, she was always cooking because we were kind of poor, so she was always cooking.
18:43 Dan Pashman? And there was one recipe in particular that Bonnie was known for.
18:46 Speaker 01 Everybody loved these cookies. The guy that plowed the road, the guy down the street, the kids at the school. She was known for these cookies.
18:54 Dan Pashman? They're called no bake chocolate oatmeal cookies. Instead of flour, they use instant oats as the base. And you mix them on the stove top with sugar, milk, margarine, peanut butter, and a packet of Swiss mist. Then you scoop the mixture out by the spoonful to form cookies.
19:08 Speaker 01 It's just a ooey gooey goody mess. You just put it out on wax paper and it kind of sets up.
19:14 Dan Pashman? I'm imagining them as being very soft.
19:16 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:17 Dan Pashman? Chewy, but you still sort of get some like texture and crispy bits from the oats.
19:22 Speaker 01 And you have to use the right kind of the oatmeal, the instant oats.
19:26 Dan Pashman? There's a Swiss mist packet or like hot cocoa packet.
19:29 Speaker 01 You can't do any other kind.
19:30 Dan Pashman? It has to be Swiss mist, right? There is, that is its own flavor.
19:34 Speaker 01 And you have to do skippy peanut butter, too. And you don't, you don't measure the peanut butter, really. You just put extra peanut butter in there. They were simple, easy, quick to make.
19:45 Dan Pashman? At school events for Bonnie's four kids, everyone knew her cookies would be there. Julie learned to make them when she was young and then taught her kids to make them. When Bonnie died in 2008, her kids were thinking about what to put on her gravestone.
19:57 Speaker 01 We thought, let's do a cookie recipe. We never knew it was going to be a thing.
20:01 Dan Pashman? Have you ever heard of someone doing that before?
20:03 Speaker 01 No, not at all, never.
20:05 Dan Pashman? The monument also has an engraving of a Cool Whip container. Bonnie always used to save and reuse the containers, another one of her signatures. The grave became a bit of a curiosity around town. Then in 2024, Rosie got in touch with Julie, told her about her project. Within a few months, Rosie was in名.
20:22 Speaker 02 I felt like such an amateur showing up for that one because I went in August. And so in my mind, I'm like, well, it's not, you know, snowy. Uh, Nome was very rainy and wet and muddy. And I showed up with white tennis shoes and a backpack with basically like the camera to document the gravestone. And the family met me at the airport and they were like, girl, what are you doing? White tennis shoes, everything turns into mud. And I think they were like afraid because in Nome, it's very life or death at times. Like there are muck oxen that will walk through town and people like tourists get impaled by and like there are sinkholes. And so they were like, gosh, the cemetery TikToker is like gonna go crazy here.
21:05 Dan Pashman? Right. She set her for a cemetery on her own very quickly.
21:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, we'll bury her here. Yeah.
21:10 Dan Pashman? Rosie made the cookies with Julie and Julie's six-year-old granddaughter, Harper. It was Harper's first time making them. Rosie captured the moment and shared it on TikTok.
21:22 Speaker 04 The three cups? This is true. Two cups. Yeah, well, that's gonna be three. We used two packets.
21:30 Speaker 01 It was fun to do that. And Harper was so excited to do that. She never met my mom, but she's like, Grandma Bonnie's, Grandma Bonnie's. So it was very fun.
21:40 Dan Pashman? Knowing that your granddaughter has this connection to your mother through these cookies, how does that feel?
21:47 Speaker 01 It's wonderful. It's, it's, we didn't have a lot of money, but her love was through cooking. And now my nieces and my granddaughter's got to experience and everything. It's wonderful to keep the memory going on. My mom would love it.
22:01 Dan Pashman? Julie lives in Fairbanks now, but she just got back from a trip to Nome. She picked Alaska blueberries with her granddaughter and visited her mom's grave. She was surprised to find a couple of tourists wandering around the cemetery.
22:11 Speaker 01 They heard something was out there with the recipe. I said, that's my mom. It was kind of cool though, that they were like checking it out. You know, we just wanted to honor her memory in a fun way, you know? My mom's up there laughing right now. She's loving it. She's loving it. She was that kind of person. She would love this.
22:31 Dan Pashman? Nome may have been the farthest Rosie traveled for a recipe, but it wasn't the most surprising of the recipes she tracked down because she actually spoke to a person who put a recipe on her own gravestone. So of course we had to talk to this person too.
22:44 Speaker 04 Neil and I live in Charleston, Arkansas.
22:46 Dan Pashman? First off, if I may, if you don't mind me asking, how old are you? You don't have to answer if you don't want.
22:52 Speaker 04 I am 77.
22:53 Dan Pashman? Okay, well, I would not have guessed that.
22:56 Speaker 04 Well, I sure don't act it. Now, let me tell you.
22:58 Dan Pashman? Rosie heard about Peggy's gravestone from a cemetery researcher in the Ozarks. So Rosie reached out to Peggy, then went down to Arkansas to meet her, make her cookies, and see her gravestone. Peggy never thought she'd see her own headstone.
23:10 Speaker 04 My mother put hers up before her and my daddy both died, you know, and she just wanted to get everything done, you know, ahead of time. And I told her, I said, "Mother, I'm not doing that. I'm not putting up a headstone."
23:23 Dan Pashman? But life had other plans for Peggy. 20 years ago, her husband Mitchell developed Alzheimer's. He died of the disease in 2019, and Peggy had to figure out his burial arrangements. She decided she'd get one double-wide headstone for both of them, which means that Peggy's headstone would go up at the same time as Mitchell's.
23:39 Speaker 04 And of course, I put a lot of stuff on there because, you know, I gotta go all out with everything.
23:43 Dan Pashman? Peggy, are you generally the kind of person who likes to go all out?
23:45 Speaker 04 Well, okay, when my husband died, I had us all to dress in camouflage, because my husband was the hunter and all. And I don't think that's going all out. It's just in remembrance of him, you know. I just want us all to dress in camouflage.
24:00 Dan Pashman? But back to Peggy's headstone. A friend told her she'd put her handwritten signature on hers. Peggy liked that idea, so she did it too. Peggy also added her wedding date.
24:09 Speaker 04 And I put it in Roman numerals. Now, don't ask me why I put it in Roman numerals. I don't know, because nobody can even read Roman numerals, you know.
24:17 Dan Pashman? Since her husband was an avid hunter, she put images of a deer and a turkey on his side of the stone.
24:22 Speaker 04 And I thought, well, I've got to have something on my side of it to balance it out. I thought, well, I'll just put my recipe on it. I've never seen a recipe on there, and I just thought it'd be different.
24:34 Dan Pashman? The recipe is for Peggy's sugar cookies.
24:36 Speaker 04 I guess I got the recipe from my mother a long time ago. And when my kids were small, back in the day, they had homeroom mothers at school. And anytime they had parties or something to do at school, we would go and help out, you know. I would make sugar cookies, and the kids just loved them, and the teachers just, you know, they loved them too. I would even see them later on after they've grown up, you know, but, "Oh, I love your sugar cookies. Have you got sugar cookies?" you know.
25:03 Dan Pashman? You're talking about your kids would say that, or other kids who grew up?
25:06 Speaker 04 No, the other kids would say that. So when they're grown up. Own now and they would come to town to see their parents and all. And I'd take them sugar cookies if I knew they were in town.
25:15 Dan Pashman? One of Peggy's granddaughters got married a few weeks ago and Peggy made the cookies for the reception. Another granddaughter who lives in Florida asked Peggy to make them with her on FaceTime a few months back. I love a sugar cookie. Would you describe yours, once they're all done, as are they more like? A little more hard and crunchy or they a little more soft and chewy?
25:33 Speaker 04 Well. I like them where they're a little bit thicker and. I don't like them hard.
25:40 Dan Pashman? I don't like a cookie that's the exact same texture all the way through.
25:44 Speaker 04 Uh huh.
25:44 Dan Pashman? You want the perimeter to be a little bit more firm and crispy.
25:47 Speaker 04 Right.
25:48 Dan Pashman? The center to be a little more soft and chewy and you get that balance and that's where you're really.
25:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:51 Dan Pashman? That's the sweet spot.
25:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. So you've got it better than me.
25:55 Dan Pashman? Now you got me wanting cookies.
25:59 Dan Pashman? Even though the recipe is on Peggy's headstone, she hardly needs it to make them.
26:03 Speaker 04 When I put my cookies together and roll them out. They've got to feel right. Cause if they are too hard or sticky, they don't feel right. So I throw them away. I start all over because they've got to feel right.
26:16 Dan Pashman? It's in the fingertips.
26:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, I guess. I don't know how it is, but my kids get on to me because I don't use a timer. I watch them in the oven, you know, I just stand there and watch them. It kind of starts crackling. And you just kind of know it's done.
26:32 Speaker 04 I mean, I know that's hard to pass on, you know, to somebody.
26:36 Dan Pashman? Can you FaceTime with each one of my listeners, Peggy, and just walk each one of them through it?
26:41 Speaker 04 Let me look at your cookies, see if they're done, you know?
26:42 Dan Pashman? Yeah.
26:45 Dan Pashman? So Peggy, like I understand that your husband passed away and you wanted this sort of joint tombstone. But like another option would have been like, you could have said, well, I'm going to decorate his and I'm going to leave it up to my kids and grandkids to decide. How mine will be decorated. Why did you decide that you wanted to choose your own? Design for your headstone?
27:05 Speaker 04 Well, have you ever seen the movie Steel Magnolias?
27:07 Dan Pashman? Yes, a long time ago.
27:08 Speaker 04 The mother and the daughter goes up to the bedroom. They're sitting there talking because she's upset because she's pregnant and all. And the daughter says, Mom, you're just upset because you can't call the shots anymore. And I think that's kind of the way I am. I want to be in charge, calling the shots. So I just do everything myself.
27:28 Dan Pashman? You didn't want to leave your tombstone up to someone else?
27:30 Speaker 04 No, no. And I didn't want them to have to deal with it. They thanked me for having a pre-arranged so that they didn't have to deal with anything, you know, or don't have to deal with anything. My friends always call me, say I'm the bossy one because I always try to boss them and tell them what to do. So, yeah, I gotta kind of be in charge of things.
27:49 Dan Pashman? All in all, are you glad that you did it already?
27:52 Speaker 04 I am. I am.
27:55 Dan Pashman? Why?
27:57 Speaker 04 Because I can see it and, you know, and I know what's there on it and...
28:02 Dan Pashman? You can make sure it's right, exactly the way Peggy wanted it?
28:04 Speaker 04 Exactly, the way I wanted it, yeah.
28:08 Speaker 04 All right, was good talking to you then.
28:10 Dan Pashman? You too. Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure.
28:12 Speaker 04 Oh, my, my grandkids are, they're just so excited. They say, Mimi, you're going to be on podcasts. I said, what is that?
28:27 Dan Pashman? Now, back to Rosie Grant, the star of this whole project in the first place. After spending three years traveling the country gathering gravestone recipes and the stories of the people behind them, she put it all together into a book that's just come out entitled, "To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes." As I said at the start, Rosie spent a lot of time as a kid walking through cemeteries, but she says she never lingered much on the tombstones. Like many people, she didn't want to think about death. Now, though, so much of her work revolves around it. So Rosie, Julia Child has a grave marker that reads, "Fat gives things flavor." Jonathan Gold, the famed food writer for the Los Angeles Times, he's got one that reads, "Tacos forever."
29:09 Dan Pashman? We already established that my headstone is going to be a piece of granite cut out of the actual countertop that I spent so much of my life standing over and cooking on. You're in your 30s, so hopefully you've got a lot of decades ahead of you. But I'm curious, have you decided what's going to be on your gravestone?
29:27 Speaker 02 I have. For my tombstone, I'm going to have a recipe for clam linguine. I have gone through the exercise now, so I've, you know, I'm working with Congressional Cemetery to pick out a plot. And then I'll probably make videos for myself of how did I decide to do this? And what were my choices? And what's it like to do pre-planning for yourself? I don't know exactly how I'm going to fit it on the gravestone. To do it the way that I like to do it, I use Sami Nosrat's homemade pasta recipe. And then you like hand cut the pasta and then you mix it with white wine and clams and butter. And it's so good. I'm going to have to figure out how to pair it back to actually fit.
30:08 Speaker 02 But I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to have as many details as I can for clam linguine on my gravestone.
30:14 Dan Pashman? So is your recipe for your gravestone, is the recipe itself set? You're working on the wording of it, but like, do you know the recipe? Or is that something that needs to be refined?
30:23 Speaker 02 The recipe itself is, I mean, just something that I think I had gotten it from an old cookbook from a while ago. And then I've just had my own version of it that I keep redoing. And that's a good question though, because as I'm working with the cemetery to first get my plot, and then eventually I'm going to be working with the gravestone carver. Like that recipe might change over the next few years.
30:44 Dan Pashman? This is the thing I would worry about, Rosie, having written a cookbook that came out last year, but was mostly written a year or two before that. Is that in the time that the book went to print and I've re-cooked some of those dishes? And then I want to make tweaks. Oh, the carbonara shouldn't have pasta water, but it should have one more egg yolk or whatever. So, once your recipe is quite literally written in stone, that's what it is. You know, what if your headstone gets made and then on your deathbed, you're like, wait, it should have had more salt?
31:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:16 Dan Pashman? In the book, you cite a quote that appears on a bench in the congressional cemetery where you interned. The quote comes from the novelist Edward Streeter, and he said, "A cemetery is not a gloomy place that speaks of death, but a vigorous entity that vibrates with life."
31:32 Speaker 02 I love that quote.
31:33 Dan Pashman? That's probably different from how a lot of people think of it. I'm curious, like, how? How is that the case, that a cemetery is a vigorous entity that vibrates with life?
31:43 Speaker 02 I mean, I guess for a lot of us, we grew up thinking of cemeteries as being these like scary, sad places that is solely for the dead, but they're also for the living to have a grieving space and even a celebration space of like, when we go to a cemetery, they are for you to remember someone who came before us. And so I also am thinking about the modern cemetery, which is very much for the living. It's the space for us to remember we are going to die someday. And so, you know, live in the present, enjoy life, be connected to your loved ones, because we're all gonna end up there someday.
32:29 Dan Pashman? That's Rosie Grant. Her new book is To Die For, A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. It's out now. Get it wherever books are sold. You can also follow her on TikTok at Ghostly Archive and on Instagram at Ghostly dot archive. Next week on the show, I talk to the one and only Paul Hollywood from Great British Bake Off. He joins me in studio to talk about what it's like inside the tent, how his judging has changed over the years, and the story behind the handshake. Will I get a handshake? Listen to find out. That's next week. While you wait for that one, check out last week's salad spinner with Jake Cohen and Vivian Howard. We talk about mayo-themed weddings, Taylor Swift's cocktails, chicken tenders, and more. That's up now. Check it out. And hey, did you know you can listen
33:10 Dan Pashman? to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me along with managing producer-
33:40 Speaker 02 Emma Morgenstern.
33:41 Dan Pashman? And senior producer- Andres. It was edited by Camille Stanley. Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. And our intern is Morgan Johnson. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. This is Zach. And Matt. From Columbia, South Carolina. Reminding you to Eat more. Eat better. And eat more better.
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