Alexandria native Rosie Grant has spent the past few years tracking down recipes taken to the grave — and now, you can try them yourself. Sharon’s French silk pie, Naomi’s spritz cookies, and Marty’s ranch dip are just a few of the dishes featured in Grant’s debut cookbook, To Die For: The Last Recipes of Beloved Cooks, out this month.
It all started back in 2021. While Grant pursued a master’s degree in library science from the University of Maryland, she interned as an archivist at D.C.’s Congressional Cemetery. Though she didn’t find any recipes engraved there, Grant soon learned that across the country, some families immortalize their loved ones’ best dishes right on their headstones.
“You’ve got to be curious,” she says. “You see a recipe and you’re like, ‘What do these cookies taste like?’”
Sharing on TikTok
Sharing her discoveries on TikTok as @Ghostly.Archive, Grant’s videos quickly went viral. She recreated each dish and visited with the families behind the recipes. The most popular clip has drawn more than 11 million views — proof that this unusual way of preserving family food history has struck a chord.
“Modern American burial trends are very personalized these days,” she says. “For a lot of people who are home cooks, food goes beyond sustenance — it’s how we gather, celebrate and show love.”
Now based in Los Angeles, Grant continues to travel and cook her way through cemeteries nationwide, bringing to life recipes like guava cobbler and spaghetti chicken casserole. These days, families reach out to her directly, eager to share their loved ones’ final — and most delicious — legacy.
Her personal favorite out of the recipes?
“Of the ones I make the most, there’s one that’s a Texas sheet cake that I really like,” she says. “It’s so good. Whenever I’ve made that before for a friend, it disappears very quickly.”
All in the Family
The project hit close to home for Grant, since she lost both her grandmothers during the pandemic. As the family’s matriarchs, they had led the holiday cooking and entertaining. The cookbook project helped Grant reminisce about her own family and treasured food memories.
“I realized that making the foods we’d shared — the yellow cake my grandmother baked or the paella my other grandmother made — brought their memories right back,” she says.
To Die For: The Last Recipes of Beloved Cooks features 40 recipes gathered over four years from headstones in 23 states. It also includes stories from the families who chose to immortalize their loved ones through food. A few living home cooks have even planned ahead — carving their recipes on their headstones before their time. Grant includes them in the book.
“How do you represent a person in just a few words on an epitaph?” she says. “I love that these families went further than saying, ‘She loved baking’ or ‘He was a good cook.’ They actually give you the tools of ingredients to continue their legacy.”
When the day comes, Grant and her husband plan to be laid to rest at Congressional Cemetery, and yes, she plans to have a recipe inscribed on her tomb.
“I’m from the DC area, this is my favorite cemetery — it just feels right,” she says.
The dish she plans to be memorialized? “A clam linguine — I love clam-based dishes,” she says. “It’s pretty simple to make so it’ll fit onto a headstone.”
Feature image courtesy Rosie Grant/Harper Collins Publishers
