To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes
By Rosie Grant
Harvest
Published Oct. 7, 2025
What would you put on your tombstone?
For the forty people memorialized in To Die For: a Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes, by Rosie Grant, there’s a recipe so significant that they or their families decided to etch it permanently into stone. Grant, a writer, researcher, archivist and content creator (@Ghostly.Archive) has spent years traveling to cemeteries in the United States to document them. In To Die For, she shares the stories behind these recipes and the loved ones who made them special.
Gravestone recipes, she writes, “aren’t just instructions for food. They’re stories, legacies, and connections between the living and the dead. They remind us that even in death, we leave behind pieces of who we are.”
I’m fortunate at 26 years old to not have had anyone close to me die, but as a child of immigrants, I’ve long struggled with the angst of feeling less rooted in this country because of a lack of things like familial plots or family recipes that have been passed down for generations. I don’t know where my ancestors are buried, if indeed they were buried instead of cremated. I have no idea what anyone older than my grandparents liked to eat, though they probably wouldn’t recognize any of the dishes in popular cookbooks in the U.S. that purport to teach people how to cook.
In To Die For, Grant offers advice and practical tips for documenting your own family’s food history and models it beautifully throughout the book, first with strangers, and then at the end, with her own gravestone recipe (right now it’s a clam linguine).
The book is an invitation to be curious about other people’s traditions and loved ones. To share in the warmth and joy they brought to the table in life and to take a small part in missing them in death. As an amateur baker, I appreciated the practicality of some of these recipes. Most do not assume that you want to bake every part from scratch as many cookbooks do. The glazed blueberry pie recipe says that the pie shell can be store bought, baked and cooled. One recipe for brownies from a New Orleans woman calls for two whole boxes of Betty Crocker Supreme Triple Chunk Brownie Mix. (If Natalee’s family is reading this, the brownies are amazing and easy to make, and the youth group students ate them up. Thank you for sharing.)
Through the book, Grant has given the gift of careful attention, even in death. There’s something meditative about baking someone else’s prized recipe. When I baked Jennifer Ferrante’s chocolate chip cookies, I realized how much isn’t written down. Grant’s version of the recipe provides more detail than the tombstone version, which just says “Combine dry. Combine wet then add dry.” But I’d never used Crisco before. Was I supposed to melt it or something before putting it in?
The cookies I made do not aesthetically resemble the photos in the book at all — not the photo of the cookies Grant baked to bring to the cemetery or the professional shot of the cookies across from the recipe. I have no idea what cookie magic Jenny or anyone else worked to make the cookies come out flat with beautiful crinkled edges, but I invited friends to come taste test them for me anyway, and we read about her as we ate.
“Her chocolate chip cookies became a symbol of her care — offered during sick visits, first days of school, and every teacher appreciation week. Wherever cookies could brighten the moment, Jenny ensured they did,” Grant writes in the book.
“Jenny is missed deeply, but her legacy lives on in every batch of chocolate chip cookies baked from her recipe,” and at that point, I got choked up.
Somewhere over a thousand miles away, someone not so much unlike me loved reading and baking chocolate chip cookies too, and by baking the recipe, I wished I knew her.
The recipe isn’t just about cookies, her family said. “It’s a map of her philosophy: simple ingredients, given time and care, can make something unforgettable.”
To Die For will bring the unforgettable to any home. In the meantime, I think I’ll try to make those cookies again and call my mom to ask how she makes my favorite boluo buns.
