A forgotten cheesecake and other lost desserts.
In conversation with Rosie Grant of @ghostlyarchive
The vague scent of mold that clung to the 1960’s floral printed wallpaper of your house mixed with the warm scent of cooking coming from the kitchen at the top of the stairs.
When I came across @ghostlyarchive in a fortuitous instagram scroll, I initially identified its creator Rosie Grant as the gatekeeper of an ethereal culinary portal.
Rosie is an LA based digital librarian who documents the discovery of unique headstones engraved with recipes such as spritz cookies, carrot cake and peach cobbler.
The self taught baker follows the recipes and returns the finished dishes (mostly sweet confections and deserts) back to the respective gravesites where she samples the results on camera.
“The original intention for the project was to demystify” She tells me.
“Now I think that food and death is something that just keeps getting more interesting.”
I. Agree.
I have been spellbound by the subject since the death of my Grandmother in 2010.
In the days before her funeral, we found a whole cheesecake beneath her bed.
It had been there for several years becoming perfectly preserved, which made me question whether she’d been saving it for a special occasion that never arrived, if it was her favourite kind of cheesecake and why in the end she never took a single bite?
Sadly the cheesecake was lost when we cleared her house but I think of it often, its crumbling facade and sunken glory.
I wish that I had held onto it, not to eat of course, rather to remember that my Grandmother once ate (or didn’t eat) cheesecake.
It’s easy to forget that the dead once shared sensations that belong to the living.
Cracked bowls upon a yellow folding table filled with cold makaron, covered in hot chicken soup. A plate of sliced cucumbers covered in cream and ground pepper.
Rosie began to curate @ghostlyarchive as an assignment during grad school.
She had an internship at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington DC, working in the digital archives.
After her first video went viral, people started reaching out to Rosie with their own family members' gravestone recipes.
“I’ll receive photos, stories about when they made the recipe and how the family continues to engage with that person in their memory.” She says.
So far recipes include Connie’s Date and Nut bread, Marion’s Heavenly Daze Ice Cream, O’ Neals Peach Cobbler, Annabelle’s Snickerdoodles, Moms Christmas Cookies and A Good Carrot Cake.
I was curious whether the individuals requested the recipes to be featured on their graves personally or if it was a decision from their families.
“It was a mix.” Rosie told me.
“The funny thing about this is that everyone I’ve talked to has a different reason but whether it was the person themselves or a family request they didn’t know that there were other gravestone recipes out there.”
That’s not surprising.
Recipes on gravestones are unusual.
I had never seen or heard of one, until I found Rosies archive.
Typically gravestone tributes are brief and impersonal; “Much loved” and “Dearly missed”.
Imagine if memorials read “Who loved sherbet lemons” or “Was partial to a square of dark chocolate.”
An old plastic bag filled with piles of thick twisted kruschiki dusted in icing sugar, soft and hard at the same time, coating the tongue and the heart.
Whether or not Rosie is the gatekeeper of an ethereal culinary portal remains to be seen but one thing is certain, her archive could transform cemetery culture as we know it starting with snacks, or more specifically; understanding the disconnect between food and death today.
“Around 100 years ago in the US, cemeteries were the first public parks.” Rosie explains.
“They were popular spots for picnicking. People would visit a dead relative and it would be a full day event. You’d bring a picnic and sit at their gravesite. We even still have the old tabletop cemeteries where someone puts an actual table on top of where someones buried. It was for picnickers to enjoy a meal with the beloved person they were remembering.”
Like so many funeral traditions; mourning jewellery, open caskets and death portraiture, the practice of graveside picnics has been lost over time.
Today the presence of food in a cemetery is almost as taboo as death itself but historically food was an integral part of mourning.
Jars and jars of pickled gherkins that lined the staircase like glowing treasures, amongst everything else that you didn’t throw away.
Commemorative eating and drinking at funerals has macabre (if not sentimental) origins.
Palaeolithic humans (or cavemen) are believed to have eaten part of the corpse before burying it with the intention of honouring and incorporating the essence of that person into one’s self. This tradition is also recognised in Amazonian cultures and explored by Beth A Conklin in her book “Consuming Grief; Compassionate Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society”
Though it may sound unfamiliar, Catholicism today carries remnants of this practice; the holy bread and wine consumed during communion symbolises the body and blood of Jesus.
“Corpse Cakes' emerged during the Middle Ages, the funeral tradition of eating a cake that represented eating the deceased. In Germany a leavened dough would be prepared and left to rise on the chest of the corpse in the belief that the dough absorbed elements of that person.
In the Victorian era “Funeral Biscuits” (hard, almost savoury cakes made with ginger or cardamom seeds) were handed out to mourners at a funeral like party-favours.
Wrapped in printed packaging which depicted poems or epilogues, the biscuits were sometimes pressed with stamps that left the impression of skulls or hearts and became a staple for baking businesses.
But by the end of the first World War the Victorian funeral traditions were replaced by today's mass-market funeral catering services, which could be where the disconnect between food and death began.
Instead of eating with the idea of consuming and retaining the essence of a person lost, the soul purpose of funeral food became focussed on comforting those in mourning.
Full fat milk lifted from a broken fridge, tasting slightly off that tainted the tea but was unique to your fire lit kitchen.
“We have a lot of funeral traditions in the US.” Says Rosie “For example, we have funeral sheet cake and funeral potatoes. These are made up of generally very easy ingredients that we already have in our kitchen. They are very filling, they are satisfying and can sit out for a long time. Food in death has a lot of comfort.”
And whether wake food is mass produced or handmade it is restorative, not only in filling our stomachs.
Taste has the ability to evoke deeply positive emotions and transport us to a specific moment in time which is another reason why Rosies archive of gravestone recipes is so significant.
“An interesting comment I get quite a lot is ‘My Mum made the best casserole or cookie or cake and when she died we lost her recipe and I wish I could go back and make it again.’” Rosie tells me. “It's made me realise the preciousness of a family recipe.”
Hot borscht and gold vodka consumed with sadness at the Dom Polski, where we peeled tens of boiled eggs and failed to get the heating to work, all the while thinking of you.
I can’t help but think that recipes on gravestones are a new kind of food preservation, not dissimilar to salting or jellying but focussed instead on conserving the identity of an individual via their taste memory.
Historically food was preserved so that it could last through the seasons and sustain us.
Is there something comparable in the way a forgotten cheesecake is perfectly preserved by its high sugar content and the sweet lifelong affections we hold for the past?
In my case, yes.
And in other cases too.
I have heard of a tradition common in Brazil in which families save a single slice of their child's birthday cake and store it in the freezer, year after year.
But I suppose the difference between these preserved examples and Rosie's gravestone recipes is that the faded cheesecake and frozen slices of birthday cake were never intended to be consumed, rather kept just as they were.
Though they represented something very beautiful in their physical form; anticipation, memory and sensory evidence of a life lived, the gravestone recipes can continue to be prepared again and again.
There's an element of renewal and sharing.
A postcard of some tiny pink cakes topped with plastic ballerinas I sent to you many years earlier which you kept on top of your bread bin. I ordered 40 for your wake and ate them wearing your black lace dress.
Rosie told me she happened upon one gravestone recipe of which the owner is still alive.
Her grave is in Arkensaw and she had a sugar cookie recipe engraved on her headstone when her husband died.
She asked herself; ‘What do I want to be known for?’
“She was so proud of this sugar recipe” Rosie told me “For a lot of people there is so much identity tied up in a recipe.”
Through @ghostlyarchive we can make new connections with the dead as well as think about how we each may like to be remembered.
We can choose what we leave behind whether it’s a sugar cookie recipe or a faded Polish cheesecake.
Whenever I smell dried mushrooms, I think of you.
Rosie doesn’t have direct access to an ethereal culinary portal but in reviving forgotten gravestone recipes she reminds us that the senses are what connect us in the collective experience of living.
With thanks to Rosie Grant @ghostlyarchive
Artwork by Glenn Whiting @whitingglenn