Rosie Grant is obsessed with gravestone recipes

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0:21Hey, thanks everybody for coming back for another episode of David Greene is Obsessed. And I want to start this week talking about food and how food and recipes can mean so much more. You know, my grandmother, my nana, I would visit her every summer and a lot of other times as well. She lived right on the beach in Margate, New Jersey, outside Atlantic City. And I would walk into her condo and immediately smell whatever she was making. Sometimes it was meatloaf. Sometimes it was her baked macaroni and cheese. often she'd be making her cabbage soup, which I just was in love with. It was a recipe, you know, from my family's Latvian and Russian roots.

1:04And when my Nana passed away, I wanted to hold on to those smells, those tastes, because food was such a connection to her, so much a part of the memories of my time with her. And for a while, I didn't have access to those recipes. And I was really obsessed with finding them. And thank goodness my wife helped me. She finally found this little wooden box that was full of my Nana's recipes, including that cabbage soup. And I've made it since then. And I really do believe that food and recipes can be so connective, especially to people we've lost in our lives. And we're going to talk on the show today about a person and her obsession.

1:48She's really leaned in to this idea. Her name is Rosie Grant. She's a librarian. She discovered recipes that were actually engraved on gravestones to help families remember people they've lost. So Rosie started Ghostly Archive. It's a TikTok and Instagram account. She's also written a book called To Die For, a cookbook of gravestone recipes. And we're going to hear from Rosie in just a minute.

2:22Rosie, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me, David. I have loved exploring people's obsessions. And I have to say, gravestone recipes was not one on my list of like top 100 things I would be expecting to cover on this show. So you're taking us to a new place. That's so funny. And yeah, maybe there'll be more gravestone-obsessed folks in the future, but happy to be the first. There's a name for it, right? Tafafile? Tafafile. Tafafile, yes. Tafafile's a thing. Okay, define tapafile. Tafafiles are folks who love cemeteries and gravestones, whether they're researchers, some are gravestone cleaners, but anyone in the category of they just like gravestones.

3:14Okay. So you're a culinary-focused taphophile. Yes, I like that. Yes, I'm a culinary-focused taphophile. Love it. So will you forgive me if I confess that I did not know that gravestone recipes were even a thing? Absolutely. If anything, I feel like I didn't know it was a thing until I got started. Okay, good. It makes me feel better. Yeah, they're not that common. And especially like, you know, we're in California. There's only two here that I know of in the entire state. There's a lot of cemeteries here, but only two recipes that I know of. There might be more one day, but as of right now. Yeah, so it's an extremely rare thing.

3:58And what is a gravestone recipe? Like, can we define it somehow just so we're all on the same page? Another great question. So, yeah, a Grecian recipe, anything, any, you know, memorial I used in cemeteries that, you know, you would have an epitaph. In traditional senses, we're used to like mother, father, death dates, birth dates, maybe like a memento mori, like a skull and wings or something. But instead of that, people put a recipe to their personal recipe. Okay, so it is honoring someone who died with a recipe engraved on the gravestone. And presumably this is a recipe that was important to that person or the family.

4:45And the family believes like this is the way that they would want to be remembered. Yeah, exactly. So in some cases, the person themselves asked for it. Like this was a final wish. And then in some cases, you know, the person passed away. the family couldn't think about what was something that really encapsulated who they were. And, you know, there's only so much space on an epitaph. And so a recipe was how they wanted to remember their person. Okay. I want to understand how you arrived at this obsession. You grew up outside of Washington, D.C., right? Yep. That's right. I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, and I was studying to be a librarian.

5:26And I'm sure most people who have an obsession that are on your show, probably somewhere librarian adjacent. We just love a deep dive. We do. I've had a guest who is obsessed with words and dictionaries. And yeah, so it's not, this is not that rare. I love that. I love that so much. I feel like most of my classmates in school, so I was at the University of Maryland studying to be a librarian. Okay. All of my classmates had various niche interests, but I needed to do an archives internship, and this was the early days of the pandemic. So a lot of places in D.C. were closed, and cemeteries were unfortunately busier than ever.

6:07So I ended up interning in a cemetery archive, and that was kind of what brought me into the Taffophile world. And I started a TikTok about what is it like to intern at a cemetery. And I was just featuring different gravestones. I was new to the death industry as much as I love a cemetery. My parents are both ghost tour guides. So I'd grown up going to lots of cemeteries, but I didn't really know how they like worked. I didn't know how the industry of it was. And so I was just so struck by all the different interesting memorials there were out there. And that's how I learned about my first gravestone recipe.

6:43Okay. There's so much to unpack there. First, I can't let go of your parents were ghost tour guides when you were a kid. Yeah. What is that? If you ever go on a ghost tour, particularly if you're in Northern Virginia, you might go on a tour with someone dressed like a pirate who would be my dad. Okay. You basically get like a walking tour history of like an old location and they tell you ghost stories that are like woven into the history of like a haunted house or a haunted, I don't know, bar or restaurant. And usually it's like some sort of like terrible tragedy that would spun up a ghost. You know, we're in Los Angeles, L.A., I should say Hollywood themselves.

7:29Like there's a lot of ghost tours around Hollywood Boulevard and the Roosevelt Hotel. So my parents basically, yeah, they just, they have to wear costumes, like old timey costumes. So I think they look like pirates when they do it. And yeah, they just tell ghost stories to people. Okay. So that was kind of your entry point to thinking about places like cemeteries as spooky and interesting. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So like, and I loved Halloween. Halloween was our favorite holiday as kids. My uncle, who's also a librarian, would host this huge Halloween party every year. And it was my literally favorite time of the year.

8:06We would tell ghost stories and family scary stories. And so it just made me very comfortable. And I feel like Halloween is that time that maybe people are a little more comfortable talking about death or the unknown. And so in any case, I found it very inspiring. So I was very excited to get an internship at a cemetery, even if it's not really what I would have assumed when I started my program, but it was the best. And when I was featuring different recipes, I was featuring at first just people in my cemetery in D.C. and then other D.C. cemeteries and then some in Maryland, some in Virginia, and then eventually just anywhere, any interesting gravestone that I learned about.

8:48And, yeah, there's a woman in Brooklyn who has a cookie recipe on her gravestone. A woman in Brooklyn. Okay. Tell me, what's the cookie recipe? What does the gravestone look like? And are the cookies good? Yeah, great questions. It is one of the most beautiful gravestones I've ever seen. You walk into Greenwood Cemetery, which is like one of the older cemeteries in Brooklyn, and it looks like an open cookbook on a pedestal. And it's just so lovely. And I think it's probably like a religious text, like, you know, pre-created, pre-carved marble. And in any case, you can, you know, you look across the text where the book is, and it's her recipe for spritz cookies.

9:33There are no instructions. So I actually made them very incorrectly the first time I made it just because I was so curious of like what does this. Oh, it's just the ingredients that are listed on the gravestone, not the instructions. Okay. Yeah, which I find funny because now that I've met with her family and, you know, we've cooked together, she was very secretive about this recipe. This was something that people would ask for in life, and she never wanted to give it to them. And it was on her deathbed that her son asked for permission to include this recipe, not only to share it, but also to put it on her grave marker.

10:07And she, you know, gave her blessing. But the fact that there's no instructions I find funny because it's sort of like she's still holding something a little bit secretive to herself. She's keeping the secret a little bit. Oh, my God, I love it. She's keeping a little secret. So she has these spritz cookies. Her family loves them. They're important to her. People have asked her for the recipe forever. She has said, no way I'm giving you this. And on her deathbed, her son asks, like, if this is the secret that he wants to reveal to the world. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, nothing else. No further secrets.

10:40But, I mean, it was something that I think she was a really, really good home cook. She was first-generation American and had just grown up in Brooklyn with her sisters. And the joke was she had this, like, multi-generational house. Her son lived there. Her granddaughter. You know, there was just so many family members that would come in and out of the house. And you couldn't bring takeout in if you brought takeout. She would just, like, give you a side eye and be like, I could make it better than whoever you got from the restaurant. So food was, like, really important to her. And she was a really, really good cook.

11:15And so I think when it came to this recipe, it was like an honoring of that, of all of the holidays that she would make these for and the birthdays. Okay. I have to back up a little bit. This is such a narrow interest. Like you can be interested in the death industry, as you put it. You can be intrigued by cemeteries. Like I go to cemeteries and I'm looking at gravestones and I'm curious about where people came from. You can also be interested in cooking and discovering unknown recipes. But like this combination is really, really specialized. Like what is it about this? Like going around the country exploring recipes that are on gravestones and trying to make these food items?

11:58Yeah, it could not be a more niche. And I definitely, when I first started, recipes and gravestones. I thought, I mean, I was laughing when I first started the TikTok because I didn't think there was much of a cemetery or taphophile audience on social media. And I was very wrong. There are some gigantic Facebook groups. There are cemetery TikTok influencers who have like millions of followers. So there's this whole ecosystem of cemetery folks online. And as far as for like my fit into the niche, I mean, at first I was just like, I'm the intern, which, you know, I could only do that for so long.

12:36But I think with food, I was really I just honestly was surprised in the beginning. So I first posted Naomi's recipe. And this was maybe about three months into the account of just like learning. This is the Spritz cookie? The Spritz cookies. Yeah. So Naomi Spritz Cookies, when I posted it, you know, obviously tons of people were like, I didn't know this was a thing. You can put a gravestone recipe together. Like, what would I put on my gravestone? And like lots of like lovely comments like that. But then there were a lot of really deep and personal food and loss stories that just strangers on the Internet started sending me of like, I lost my mom last year.

13:16I make the birthday cake that she made for me every year on my birthday and her birthday, or I miss my dad. He died several years ago. I make his chili every Sunday still, and I eat it, and I just remember my time with him. And like one story after another about food and loss and missing a person and how food brought them back to, like, there's just, you know, the senses are there. You're smelling the things you smell together and tasting something very nostalgic. At first, I was just like, wow, one person did this. How cool. And then while I was trying to learn more about Naomi, I learned there was another woman named Kay who's buried in Utah who was a fudge recipe.

13:54And then there's another woman named Maxine who's buried in Iowa who was a Christmas cookie recipe. And then it just kept going. And when I was at 10 recipes, I was like, that's probably it. I don't think there's any more. And then when I was at about 10 recipes, families started reaching out being like, I thought my mom was the only crazy one who did this. try her cheese tip gravestone recipe or try her carrot cake gravestone recipe. So at that point, I was getting directly in contact with the families. And so I was it was truly just born out of curiosity in the beginning. I was like, well, why did you decide to do this?

14:29And the stories were so personal and so beautiful. I just became very like, I don't know, like I just wanted to know more about each person. It just got more interesting as it went. And I started treating it like an archival, like a community archives project. And I think when I was at about 20 recipes, several editors reached out and they're like, hey, would you want to do like a cookbook? Yeah. And in my mind, I was like, I don't know if I'll ever have that many recipes and it would have to be a very different type of cookbook. Like, it was so important to tell the story of the person behind each gravestone.

15:05And I needed to get in contact with all of the families to get there, you know, see how they felt about it, if they wanted their person included or not. How did they want to tell the stories of them? And so there was just a lot of, like, oral history that needed to happen. And I'm so shocked because I'm like, we found, I now know of actually 50 people who decided to do this. And I never would have guessed that. Yeah. And we should say that the book is called To Die For, a cookbook of gravestone recipes. And congratulations. I hope many people will read it. But I'll tell you, Rosie, really the way, the more you describe this, the more it really does make a lot of sense why this has touched you so much.

15:46I think about my own grandmother who I lost and I searched so hard and finally found her recipes for cabbage soup, for meatloaf, for macaroni and cheese. It was just things I loved and that was my connection to her. And, you know, to take that one next step, and maybe I would have decided to put that cabbage soup recipe on her gravestone, but it was that important. And, you know, I think about my wife, too. Like, she owns restaurants. She's Lebanese, Italian. Her connection to her family is all about food. Her memories of growing up and connection to parents and aunts are all about food. And she's honored them by traveling the world.

16:29and she's filled her restaurants with recipes that are just taken from people around the world and she wants to honor those recipes somehow and like honoring a recipe as like the memory of someone who's passed away, it really does all start to make sense and seem not so esoteric. Yeah. Oh, and I love that. I love that you were able to get your grandma's recipes and that she's done. Thank God. I was so worried. And it was like, I mean, she had like news clipping, I mean, clippings from cookbooks and clippings from newspapers with little recipes and like her handwritten. I mean, there are definitely some ingredients that I could not read.

17:06Like, I mean, there was some chicken scratch type of stuff going on. But just I think it was it was less about exactly what it said and more just like holding those pages were incredibly meaningful. And so an engraving on tombstone like that the power of that totally makes sense. Yeah, it's so true. And I think, like, at the end of this project, like, you know, there's a novelty to it of, like, oh, how interesting that there's a recipe on a gravestone. But I think, like, the bigger goal is exactly that of, like, being interested while you can because these things are very ephemeral. And if you don't take the time to search for it, document it, cook it with them, then it's very easy to lose these things.

17:47And I mean, this was coming out of when I started the project. So in the earlier days, both of my grandmothers passed away, you know, very like I was maybe at like four or five recipes in and I was realizing how little I had done that for my family. And like even my own parents right now, like I need to document it and actually, you know, write down my dad's jambalaya recipe and cook it with him. And like it doesn't have to end up on the gravestone as long as you're going through the work of like personal archiving these things. It's so precious. Yeah. It's one thing I've been noticing in talking to more and more people about their obsessions.

18:25obsessions. Like some of these things can start in such a random way and seem so weird in the beginning. But then it's like, as you dig in, there's a depth and a seriousness that you realize. I just wouldn't have, I would never have imagined that I would have learned about this many people. And not only that, of course, like that all of the families would have signed off on it because that was equally important to make sure that like, you know, someone who's lost and they all have like kids and grandkids. These are like very in the like recent memory of people who are still living that are mourning their person.

19:04And yeah, so I'm just I'm honestly like it's it's truly shocking to me to be here because like I just wouldn't I'm so grateful because it's like, you know, I was an English major in college and I did creative writing as a minor and I studied food writing and I really loved how food connects to everything. And I'm like, I'm not even like an amazing cook. Like I like eating more than anything else, which great to be in LA and great to have a project like this where it's just an excuse to like talk to people about food memoir and food history and like influence. And like, these are all home cooks.

19:39No one's like a famous chef or anything, which makes it even better in my mind. Yeah. So yeah, it's so funny how random these things begin. Tell me a little bit about your process. So you'll hear about or find a cemetery where there's a recipe and then you'll be interested and track down the family and start talking to them about what you might do with it? Pretty much, yeah. I have this like giant, this is my, the librarian side. So I have this huge Google doc of like references and cross references. I have a big spreadsheet and that's just more of like all of the information more because I'm a goldfish brain and I will forget everything.

20:19But I have everyone's, you know, like if I don't have it written down, I have like I have no idea who I am. And so with each person, I'll, you know, the more, the most common way, because I should say they're all crowdsourced. I've never walked into a cemetery and just seen a gravestone recipe. So usually they were sent to me or they were posted online somewhere. Like the first and maybe eight of them were very well featured on either social media or Reddit or Facebook groups or Twitter or a couple of blogs or news articles. And then after the few after that were families had sent them to me. And then after that were just random people on the Internet were like, hey, I heard you do this thing.

21:02Do you know about this one here or this one here? And they'll just send me the photo. And in those cases, I mean, I'm so grateful and it's incredible to learn about them. I ask for as many details as they know about this person. And usually they're like, I have no idea it's in this cemetery in Arkansas or in Maine. I just, that's all I know. And so I'll look up the person. I'll find their obituary. Most of them can be found in like online archives. I'll find their find a grave, which gives me the geolocation. And I have this huge Google map that's pinned of where everyone is. And then I'll, from their obituary, just start reaching out to family.

21:39And usually it's a lot of Facebook messages, Instagram messages. If I could find an email, sometimes the obituary would have an email or contact and just start basically cold messaging people. And in the beginning, I was like, I mean, I just felt so bad for bothering people. But I was like, well, I can't really I won't move forward until this. And usually the biggest message that I would get back is like, who the heck are you? And like a lot of people are like, what are you doing? Like, how did you hear about my mom in Alaska? Like, what? And so, but after that, when we got onto a phone call and I would just be like, you know, this is the project.

22:20Feel free to think about it. It was honestly like it would just kind of hit the ground running from there. You know, obviously grief doesn't really have a timeline whether a person had died a year ago or 10 years ago. And so I tried to match where people were at. If some folks just wanted to talk via email, they're like, yes, you can include my dad's recipe. I don't want to get on the phone. I just, you know, it's painful to talk about it, but I'll answer any questions and I'll take my time with it. And, you know, I'd love to review whatever you write at the end. But like, you know, we don't need to do anything further, which I think is amazing.

22:53Like that's so kind of them to even meet me there. One of the daughters who I first reached out to, she, it was like maybe two or three years where when I first reached out to her, she was like, let me think about it. And she followed me on Instagram and just would like, and she would comment on all my stuff. And every like six months I would be like, hey, how are you feeling about this? And she's like, still thinking. And after like a year or two, she was like, okay, I'm ready to talk. And we hopped on the phone. So yeah, there's really no like time limit for any of these. What do you think she was thinking about?

23:26Like, what do you think was her hesitation? Her mom actually went viral way before I came along. Her mom is Maxine Menster, which has a Christmas cookie recipe that has been very well featured on the Internet. And again, way before I came along. And it was featured kind of in a meme of like, mom said you can have the recipe over my dead body. And it just got it went super viral. And to the point that like Good Morning America reached out to her and all these other big media outlets have like, tell us about your mom that wouldn't share her recipe. and she was really insulted by it because she was like, my mom actually was very open with sharing this recipe.

24:02I don't know who made this, my mom, into a meme. Oh, man. But she was like, yeah, you know. And like the flip side to that too is several of the gravestone families learned about the idea to do a gravestone recipe because of the meme. So when I've been interviewing them being like, how did you get this idea? And they're like, well, I saw this woman who had, who was like an over, like you can't have my recipe until like over my grave or something. It was like a Christmas cookie recipe. And I was like, oh, my gosh, that was Maxine's gravestone recipe. So I think with her daughter, she was just she wanted to make sure, like, you know, why am I doing this?

24:36Am I going to turn her mom into a meme? Like, you know, what are my intentions with doing this? So I think she was she was very right to be like, I don't know who you are. Like, give me time and I'm going to think about it. And then after a while, she was like, OK, I like this. Like, I can handle this. And she gets to control the narrative of like whatever she wants to say is like what I'll pass along. But, you know, it takes time. I'm a weirdo on the Internet. What can I say? Not at all. You've gotten some negative comments, though, like suggesting that you shouldn't be traipsing around grave sites.

25:10And what would have been some of those comments and how have you processed them? Yeah, definitely. I've gotten several comments, especially like, you know, if a video does well enough, that means everyone's going to see it. whoever has a phone, if they're on TikTok or whatever. And I find it, I mean, I think on the surface level, I find it very understandable. I grew up, as much as I'm like, I love a cemetery, but I am very afraid of death. And I think there's a lot of taboos around cemeteries and gravestones and like, how do we behave in these places? And I think along those lines of like, I don't think like the main comment, the main negative comment that I get is like, I don't think you should even go to cemeteries.

25:53I think you're going to get cursed. It's bad luck. It's evil. You're going to get like angry ghosts coming after you. Oh, wow. That's not the criticism I was expecting. I thought it was going to be like, you're not respecting people's like final resting place. They're saying you're going to get a curse. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like there's that too. And I think there's a lot of like, there's a lot of like fear around visiting cemeteries just in general, which I think some of that does come from taboo. It is also a very like Western view of how cemeteries are supposed to work. So technically, if you look at American cemetery history, our first national public parks were cemeteries.

26:32So we have the rural cemetery, which Mount Auburn was the first one. Greenwood in Brooklyn is another example. And they were meant to be official green spaces that were designated. They were cemeteries. They were, you know, burial spaces. But the idea is you would go out on the weekends, you would get out of the city, they would be, they would have art, they would have sculptures, they would have landscapes, they would all have names of trees like Maple Hill and things like that. And they were meant to be peaceful and people would picnic there. They would spend all weekend. And it was just like a way to like be in a green space.

27:03But I was, it was specifically at cemeteries. And even if you go to a lot of older cemeteries, Greenwood included, you see the tabletop gravestones, which were gravestones that were for picnicking on. So the idea of like, you would bring your picnic and actually picnic on top of someone's grave. And that was the purpose of that gravestone, which we have come very far away from that. And I'd say like, we're now kind of like, maybe because of the pandemic and we as a culture and society, all humans, we're reckoning a little bit more with our mortality than we might be comfortable with. But a lot of cemeteries are starting to bring that back.

27:39And I would say this is more the archivist side of me of like, if we aren't connected to our local cemeteries, if we don't visit them, if we're not, we don't care about them, then a lot of them will start to disappear. It's a very expensive model to take care of cemeteries. And I'm coming from the D.C. area where we've lost quite a lot of minority cemeteries because they got disconnected from the local community. The archives got lost. They didn't know who owned the land. And then it was eventually bulldozed and like a parking lot or a shopping mall was put over them. And so I think it's extremely important to visit cemeteries, even though like, you know, obviously there's cemetery rules for a reason and being respectful and not, you know, like knowing the grievers will be there, funerals might be happening.

28:24But like, you know, we're in LA. I think Hollywood Forever has such an interesting model of like, there are bands that come in and they do yoga and they do movie nights and they do like big festivals and it's very much bringing in the community and that's how people will continue to care about it. You said something that caught me. I mean, you're a taphophile who is afraid of death. Tell me more about your fear. Yeah. I mean, I remember when I was a little kid and going to my great grandmother's funeral and it was my first time it was maybe like I don't know five um and it was my first time of really being aware that like oh everyone's gonna die and I remember being so scared of that I actually remember I don't think I've ever told this story to anyone before I remember it was at the same time my cousins my aunt and uncle and my cousins were planning a trip to Disney World and I decided not to go me as like a little kid because I was like but like my parents might die someday.

29:28And like, I need to spend as much time with them as I can. So I didn't go to Disney World because I was so scared that my parents would, you know, quote unquote, die at some point in the future. They were not saying. Oh my God, you had to maximize your time with them. Like any day away from them might be like missing the chance for, wow. That's amazing. Yeah. That was my like five-year-old kid brain was just like, oh my gosh, like, what if they'll die and I need to like spend as much time. So I like missed this trip. And yeah, it was just something that I was so freaked out about. And even still, I think I'm very uncomfortable with like my loved ones and myself and all of us will all pass away someday.

30:05And I think like I assumed growing up that like the more I didn't think about it, the more I wouldn't have to deal with it, which is just not how things go. And there's this movement called the death positive movement that began with hospice nurses. And it's the idea that people in society are better off if we talk about death, if we, even if it's something like, how do we, how do you want to be remembered? Do you want a funeral? Do you want to be cremated? You have this favorite joke. Do you want that on your gravestone? Do you want this song played? there's a woman who's featured in the cookbook who her daughter knows that her mom is around or it's like a sign from her mom whenever she sees a white feather and anything like so it's just any sort of like reckoning with this and it can be a really like good healthy thing to do I mean I have to believe even though it wasn't intentional that your investment in like a positive side of cemeteries is a way of like confronting and dealing with your fear.

31:09Does it feel that way? Oh, absolutely. I think like, I mean, especially because this was all born out of the pandemic where I was like, especially in the early days, I was so scared for my loved ones, like little things like, you know, my parents are getting a little older and I have siblings with asthma. And I was just, I was so like my, I was living my fears a little bit more presently than I think I was comfortable with. And I think because of this project, it allowed me to think about more the celebration side of a person. Like, you know, death is not a failure. We will all die no matter how healthy we are, how much, like how many Disney trips we miss.

31:48And I think like it was a really healthy way for me to get a little, maybe like almost like immersion therapy of like just being in this space and talking to people about it. For people who I've lost that I just didn't know what to do with the feelings about it and emotions and just like publicly grieving. I just find like, and cemeteries do provide that space, which I think is amazing. Is there a favorite recipe from the book? I know a lot of people who do cookbooks, that's like the question they never want to get. So I apologize ahead of time for asking it. But is there one that stands out to you?

32:25One that I've been making quite a lot lately, my partner and I just eloped and we actually had this at our wedding little gathering. Congratulations. Thank you. We did it in Venice, actually. Nice. And I made this woman named Helen. She has a Texas sheet. She's buried in Michigan, but she has a Texas sheet cake gravestone recipe. And I had never had a Texas sheet cake before. It is so good. It's super moist. It's like a chocolate cake. And every time I make it, it disappears so quickly. I get so many compliments for it. And it's really fun. You like take boiling water and you pour it into the basically like the batter.

33:03So a Texas sheet cake is a traditional funeral food in the sense that funeral foods, in the U.S. at least, a lot of them are like shelf stable. You already have them in your pantry. It's pretty, you know, eggs, flour, butter, milk, that sort of thing. And it feeds a lot of people and you can leave it out for a long time. So if you're hosting mourners after a funeral, the Texas sheet cake is really great for that. And like, yeah, it's very satisfying. Oh, people can come and go and it doesn't get dry. Exactly. Yeah. It's like really nice for just like a long event. And so she would make it for that.

33:37And she would also make it for other occasions too. And it's just a really good cake. Sounds amazing. What does this obsession say about you? Like what have you learned about yourself?

33:52Well, that I have a very niche interest. I don't know. I think like for me, this was it was born out of a lot of things that I've always enjoyed. Like, yes, I have always I've always loved, you know, alternative spaces like cemeteries or I should say like grieving spaces. I just find them. I've always liked them. I've always found them very peaceful places. And I've always liked food. I am I guess I'm a little surprised that I was able to bring two things that I really like together. And I'm shocked that I'm truly shocked to be here. I mean, I also think like at the end of the day, this project is such a like, like I love archives.

34:35I love community archives. I think they're so important. And it's been a really interesting of like how to conduct oral histories, how to just talk with a lot of strangers from all over the world. I like talking. So it's been nice. And this gives you the chance. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't know. I'll have to think about that even more of like what it says about me. I mean, I love project managing. This has also been just an exercise of like a really insane spreadsheet just to try to keep everything straight for folks. The most boring answer possible. No, but it's a boring thing that you've turned into something so joyful.

35:14Yeah. To make spreadsheets in a fun way. Yeah. Rosie, we're going to take a quick break and I'm going to come back and I have a few more questions to throw at you about other obsessions. I love it. We'll be right back.

35:34we're back with more david green is obsessed and i'm with rosie grant who is the author of a new cookbook called to die for a cookbook of gravestone recipes she also uh founded the website and social media platform ghostly archive um this is the part of the show i like to call rosie grant is obsessed um let's stay on food for a minute is is there a recipe in your life that you're obsessed enough about that you would want it on your gravestone currently if i had to pick i really like a clam linguine so good it's so good but it has to be just right that the like ratio of pasta to clam needs to be it can get soupy so quick but it can get soupy real fast and but i love the like it's really fun for like dinner parties like i love the like pre when we my partner and i will host people for dinner and when like and my favorite thing is to make some mean nasratz i mean so i should say it could be pasta or linguine either way i like to make some mean nasratz um homemade pasta and we all like i force my guests to work for their food i guess we're like you know churning it out and like you're drying the pasta And then when you throw it in with the sauce, like the white wine and butter and the clams and like the smell is so good.

36:58And it's just like a very satisfying meal. It's so sad. I love eating with my wife, but she's not like a big clams person. And so it's like that I associate that meal with like I'm alone. I'm at a restaurant or somewhere where I can have this, but I'm missing my wife. So it's like this hard, it's this hard thing, but I associate that, um, that meal, but I, I, I love it too. Um, okay. What's another obsession in your life that scares you? Oh, that scares me.

37:36Um, I mean, I feel like, I feel like honestly, I, my whole, my, like, since I was a kid, I've always like, maybe this is again, like the librarian braid of like, the more I learn about something. In my mind, it makes me think that I will take away the fear. Like, I remember being a kid and being afraid of dinosaurs, like, really, really scared. Like, I saw a dinosaur in a book, and I just became obsessed with dinosaurs, not because I thought they were cool, because I thought they would eat me in the middle of the night. But, like, I went to— Which they would if they were not extinct. I mean, they probably— Yeah, exactly.

38:09Yeah, they would totally eat me. I'd be a little snack for them. And so I went to the History Museum. I checked out every book from the library. I learned all, like, I went, like, so hard on dinosaurs for several years. From there, it evolved into sharks. I became, like, super obsessed with sharks. I, like, even wanted to go, and I'm, like, terrified of sharks, wanted to go shark diving. I wanted to go off of South Africa, do, like, the cave diving. I, like, would watch Shark Week every week. Even, so I was in D.C. Discovery Channel is based right there in Silver Spring. And so I would go to, like, they would have Shark Week events.

38:43I would go to the zoo, which would have all these shark events. And so I just was like very active. But it was because I was scared of sharks. Not because I was like, oh, sharks are fun. But I was really scared of them. And then this is more my TikTok algorithm feed. It's on Appalachian tales, like Appalachian stories and old Appalachia folk tales. And I cannot get enough of it. I'm on every single storyteller, weird, like don't whistle at night. Don't leave anything behind. If you hear your name, no, you didn't. Like that whole, all of those rules. And so I would love to do like a hiking trip in Appalachia at some point.

39:22Oh, wow. And just, yeah. Not because I want to, but because I'm like, I need to like face this fear to make it, I don't know, lesser. There is some lesson I think you're teaching all of us. Like if you're afraid of something, there's the option of just leaning into it, understanding it, archiving it, and you can really make the fear go away. Yeah. Yeah. So far, so good. I'm not afraid of dinosaurs or sharks at the moment. Yeah. Or death as much. Yeah. Yeah. What's an obsession you've never told anyone about until right now? Hmm. I'm sure I have something weird. Well, I guess right now, I think, I'm trying to think of like no one knows.

40:10My partner knows most of my weird obsessions. Okay, it can be everyone except, you've never told anyone except your partner. Everyone except, yeah, except for them. I'm willing to budge there. We haven't even like talked too much about it, but they've just noticed because I keep collecting it. I'm so obsessed with community cookbooks. So as I was traveling around the country to visit all of these cemeteries and document the gravestones, I would always go thrift shopping in a weird little community cookbook store or thrift store or vintage or antique store. And, like, they're more ratty, the book, like, you know, off the spiral thing.

40:41There's receipts stuck in it. There's, like, notes. There's, like, sauce spills. Those are the books that I would really, like, go crazy for. So I probably have about 100 community cookbooks. because this is why my partner knows this, because they're like, you can't keep bringing in more community cooks. Yeah, they're like everywhere. I'm like starting to have to put them in my closet because he's like, this is like becoming too much. But like each one is so different. And so I'm like, in my mind, I'm like, I have to get more because like I would be referencing them while I'm cooking. My goal was always to find a community cookbook that would also have a similar recipe to the person of the gravestone recipe that I was cooking in that area.

41:19and just to see if like the ingredients were the same a lot of times it was based off of like like in Alaska it's hard to get stuff to know like everything has to be shipped in so their community cookbook which has this gravestone recipe actually featured in it has just like only specific things you can get in Nome Alaska it's a lot of fishing it's a lot of seafood and so anyways like I am I haven't really figured out what to do with this yet again this is more of the like goblin collectory kind of thing. Yeah. But I want to do something with that one day because I just find it like so fun and weird.

41:54How do you define community cookbooks? Like the recipes of Nome, Alaska or the recipes of Murray, Kentucky? Okay. Very localized. Oftentimes like a small organization, there's only usually like 100 printed for like usually like a fundraiser or something for some local group. Often they're like spiral bound. And I just think they're so fun. And yeah, they're very like, sometimes they'll come with like stories about the community. So I have a community cookbook from a cemetery in Texas, and it has all these funny tidbits about folks buried in the cemetery. And I just think that's so cool. And like, it's such a specific part.

42:31And they only printed 50 of the book to raise money to do proceeds for like cemetery upkeep. Yeah, I love that. You mentioned Nome, Alaska. Is that where the cool whip recipe? Yes. From your book came from? Okay. Yes. It's a recipe for what? Remind us. For no-bake cookies. Okay. And it involves Cool Whip. And there's like a container of Cool Whip that is on the gravestone? Is that? Yeah. Okay. So her name is Bonnie. Yeah. This is a gnome. So for people who've watched like Balto, the Iditarod started and now technically it ends there. But, you know, all the diphtheria victims are buried in the same cemetery as her.

43:11and she worked at the DMV. She was a single mom and she had these no-bake cookies, which, I mean, just in general, like shopping in Alaska is very difficult. Everything has to be shipped in. I should say like Gnome specifically is very difficult because everything has to be shipped in. The only like chain thing they have there is a subway, like a very small subway. Water is$40 in the, like we went grocery shopping to get all the ingredients. And so So all of her cookie ingredients had to be shelf-stable and accessible. And you don't throw things away because it's just hard to get stuff. So she kept the cool-up container from another recipe and just would use it as her Tupperware.

43:53And so, like, she would store these cookies in the cool-up container. Just this idea of, like, everything got reused and repurposed. Nothing was wasted. And then on the side of her grave, so, you know, she has the, like, the details of her no-bakes, the cool-up container that she would store it in under there. And on two other sides of the gravestone is this really cool obelisk in the cemetery. But it's poems from her granddaughters just about her. And then there's an iris on the fourth side, which is a favorite flower of hers. And then all these little rocks that her granddaughter and great-granddaughter collected that are like heart-shaped rocks.

44:26So it's such a cool gravestone. That sounds amazing. When I die, I want a gravestone that cool. Yeah. That sounds amazing. It was so thoughtful. Like, yeah, she was so loved by her family. She just, and like going there to visit was like, in my mind, I was like, once I go to Nome, if I can get out there, then this project is like, it was the hardest one to get to. It was like three flights. It took like 30 hours. But you made it. Made it. And it was the best experience of my life. That's awesome. Rosie Grant, your new book is To Die For, a cookbook of gravestone recipes. and she is obsessed with gravestone recipes.

45:07Rosie, it's been really lovely talking. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's been so fun talking about obsessions.

45:19David Green is Obsessed at the production of Campside Media. It is hosted by me, David Green. Our senior producer is Lane Rose. We are mixed by Ewan Leitrimuen. The executive producers of Campside Media are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Scher, and Josh Dean. Special thanks to our operations team, Ashley Warren and Sabina Mara. If you have an obsession you would like to share, hope you do, you can send us an email. The address is obsessed at campsidemedia.com. That's obsessed at campsidemedia.com. And hey, if you enjoyed the show, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. Really appreciate you listening.