Four dishes on real headstones—chocolate oatmeal cookies, a cheese dip, blueberry pie and chicken soup—preserve more than recipes. In Sarah Martens’s account, each one points back to a person, a family tradition or a favorite meal. The recipes are part of a wider project by Rosie Grant, whose book To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes gathers food inscriptions and the stories around them.
Four recipes, four stories
Martens describes trying the dishes below. The preparation details and tasting impressions are hers; they are not independent recipe tests.
| Person and dish | What the recipe involves | Story attached to it |
|---|---|---|
| Bonnie Johnson’s chocolate oatmeal no-bake cookies | Swiss Miss instant cocoa is boiled with sugar, milk and margarine. Quick oats, peanut butter and vanilla are mixed in, then spoonfuls are left on wax paper to set. | The recipe is engraved on Johnson’s headstone. Martens says her family liked the cookies. |
| Deb Nelson’s Red Lantern cheese dip | Spreadable sharp cheddar, mayonnaise, sour cream, garlic powder, dried minced onion and milk are mixed together, topped with bacon bits and chilled. | Nelson worked at the now-closed Red Lantern Steakhouse. Her dip recipe is engraved on her headstone in Dow City Cemetery, Iowa. Martens describes it as creamy and nostalgic. |
| Margaret Davis’s glazed blueberry pie | A baked, cooled pie shell is layered with softened cream cheese and fresh blueberries, then finished with homemade blueberry sauce and chilled for at least an hour. | Davis rests with her husband at Mountain View Memorial Park in Washington State. Martens says Davis was known for sharing the pie recipe at Christmas, a detail attributed in the article to the Seattle Times. |
| Valerie C. Volpe’s chicken soup | The recipe includes parsnips and turnips, with parsley and dill in the broth. Martens reports a rich broth and tender vegetables. | Volpe’s recipe was inscribed from her recipe card at the top of her headstone. |
The four dishes range from a quick-set sweet to a chilled dip, a fruit pie and a simmered soup. The article does not give consistent yields, total cooking times or standardized difficulty ratings, so those comparisons cannot be made reliably.
How recipes become memorials
A recipe on a grave marker makes an everyday act—cooking and sharing food—part of a public remembrance. Rosie Grant has described the impulse simply: “Food is this beautiful memory tool that connects us better than just a name and date.” Ripley’s Believe It or Not! published the remark in an interview with Grant.
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Not every recipe in Grant’s collection is engraved in full. Some are carved on stones; others are connected to a grave and its story. And an inscription can leave a cook with questions. Grant told Ripley’s that a Brooklyn marker for Naomi Miller-Dawson, shaped like an open book, listed ingredients for spritz cookies but no instructions. Grant first made them like sugar cookies. After readers explained that spritz cookies require a cookie press, she tried one and brought cookies to the grave with her mother. Her account describes that learning process.
Rosie Grant’s book widens the collection
To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes was published by HarperCollins in 2025. Google Books lists it at 176 pages and describes a collection of 40 recipes found on gravestones or associated with a grave story, accompanied by family interviews and photographs of food, gravestones and memorabilia. The catalog examples include spritz cookies, homemade fudge, chicken soup, French silk pie and guava cobbler. Its ISBN is 9780063424401. See the Google Books listing.
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Grant’s work grew from a digital-archives internship at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Eater reports that she began by documenting cemetery life online, then built an archive around recipes, people and locations, adding obituaries and oral histories. The publication says she contacted living relatives, explained the project, sought permission and interviewed family members; it also reports that she visited all North American gravestones included in the book. Read Eater’s profile of Grant’s project.
The book’s scale is a different measure from the popularity of the subject: its catalog description identifies 40 recipes, while Eater reported that Grant had more than 200,000 followers at the time of its 2025 article. That is a dated audience figure, not a current count or evidence that recipe-bearing headstones are common.
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What these recipes preserve
Martens’s four examples show how a recipe can serve as a compact family legacy: a dish remembered by relatives, associated with a workplace or shared at a holiday table. The food is concrete, but the inscriptions also invite readers to ask who made it, who ate it and which details mattered enough to carry into a memorial.
That context matters as much as the ingredient list. A carved recipe may preserve only part of the method—as the spritz-cookie example demonstrates—and the personal story may depend on relatives and records beyond the stone itself.
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