Let's write about engraving recipes on cemetery headstones? Who knew?

You can have this recipe over my dead body 😋😀😅❗

Rosie Grant has spent the past several years collecting, sharing, and cooking recipes engraved on headstones. Echo article published in the Boston Globe by Oliver Egger, an editor and writer based in New Haven, Connecticut. He received the 2025-26 Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.

Most of the more than 600,000 gravestones at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, look the same: name, dates, and maybe an epitaph, such as “loving mother” or “beloved son.” 

But beside the manicured gardens and crisscrossing pathways are some outliers: a miniature replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, a metal bear perched on a gravestone, and an obelisk with a slot where visitors can deposit their secrets.

Compelling all, but for Rosie Grant, the most striking is a headstone with an open cookbook carved into the top. The book’s granite pages reveal a simple recipe for spritz cookies: “1 cup of butter or margarine, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 1 egg, 2 1/4 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon salt.” The recipe was a favorite of Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson, a lifelong Brooklynite, postal clerk, and mother who died at 87 in 2009. An avid baker, Miller-Dawson would make trays of light and buttery cookies every holiday season. In life she kept the recipe close to her chest, but in death, she shares it with the world.

Grant first became a taphophile*, or cemetery appreciator, during a summer internship at the Congressional Cemetery — officially the Washington Parish Burial Ground — in Washington, D.C., in 2021. She has since started a popular TikTok and Instagram, @ghostly.archive, to document the history of cemeteries and unique gravestones. She discovered Miller-Dawson’s headstone recipe during the pandemic, when she, like many of us, was baking frequently. She made the cookies and posted about the experience on TikTok. That post went viral. Messages poured in from people sharing stories of their own loss and grief — and family recipes. Making a dad’s barbecue sauce or a mom’s chocolate chip cookies “was able to bring that person a little bit closer,” Grant says.

Moved by the outpouring, Grant looked into whether the tombstone recipe was part of a larger phenomenon. The first-known headstone evoking matters culinary belongs to the Roman Eurysaces the Baker, circa 50 to 20 BC, and includes pictorial engravings showing how to bake bread. But Grant could find only 52 recipe gravestones from more recent times.

She set out to document many of them — from no-bake cookies in Nome, Alaska, to meatloaf in New Braunfels, Texas, to a cinnamon roll cake in Kibbutz Na’an in Israel. In all, Grant visited 39 gravestones and shared each recipe on social media. All of them are in her forthcoming cookbook, “To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the recipes are for comfort foods like cookies, brownies, and cakes.

Grant doesn’t just snap a picture of each gravestone recipe — she digs through obituaries and public records and connects with the families of the deceased. She cooks the recipe with them and learns the story of their departed loved one. Grant says this experience has prompted hours-long conversations. “I don’t know how to describe it any other way than it felt like the food brought them back with us,” Grant says.

The result, says Grant, has been “a big oral history of food and legacy, mostly of women, how they were community centers, where they did all their volunteer work, how they hosted every holiday, and how they made the lives of others special.”

There is Annabell Gunderson, who worked at a school in Northern California and is buried beneath her snickerdoodle cookies recipe, which she often made for volunteer firefighters battling forest fires.

There is Marjorie Dawn Guppy from Grand Rapids, Michigan, a restaurant owner and beloved matriarch, forever memorialized by the recipe for her chocolate cookies, which were favorites in her family and across her town.

There is Mary Ann Rapp, who lived in Bristol, Tennessee, and whose tombstone is engraved with her fruitcake recipe. Her favorite saying was “A real baker always has flour on their face.” Every Christmas, Mary would dust her children’s or grandchildren’s cheeks with flour as they baked fruitcakes together.

And there is my personal favorite: Roberta Jackson, who lived in Brooklyn, New York, and whose recipe for kasha varnishkes — a traditional Jewish dish of buckwheat grains, caramelized onions, and bowtie pasta — concludes with the line: “Does it taste like mine? It does? Good!”

Grant now has 413,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram combined, and she hears from many of them that they intend to put a recipe on their own headstone. For hers, Grant has chosen a recipe for clam linguine.

Beyond inspiring future culinary headstones, Grant hopes her recipe project breaks some of the Western stigma around talking about death and inspires people to document their families’ own food history — to save precious family recipes before it’s too late.

*(AI definition): A taphophile is a person with a strong interest in cemeteries, gravestones, and the history and art associated with them, rather than a morbid fascination with death. Derived from the Greek words "taphos" (tomb) and "philia" (love), a taphophile might visit cemeteries to appreciate their historical significance, document gravestone art, research genealogy, or simply enjoy the unique atmosphere and connection to nature

Let's write about learning to protect and preserve our "stuff"

Oh joy! Fixing something rather than throwing it away!
Grab your tools for the fight against planned obsolescence*.

An echo essay published in The Boston Globe by Veronique Greenwood.

This essay reminded me about the stand up comedian George Carlin's routine http://www.HaphazardStuff.com about "stuff". A video link is at the site here- just hit "skip ads". George Carlin's classic standup routine from his appearance at Comic Relief in 1986. (Farewell George 1937-2008)

On one bright June afternoon, in a hilly neighborhood of Worcester, Mass, I pulled up in front of Karen Curcio’s apartment house. I had driven an hour to find her, threading my way through backstreets. 

Piles of "stuff" can be saved, recycled and repaired.

In my trunk was the reason. I lifted it out gingerly, making sure to keep it from bumping against the car. I carried the chair to the stoop where she waited.

The chair! What a chair — made of black-painted wood, with slender legs spun on a lathe, trimmed in gold. It reminded me of my grandparents’ furniture, rocking chairs and end tables topped with blue Wedgwood cracker jars. It was solid without being bulky, like an ancient Chinese scholar’s chair, like an heirloom that could last.

But the chair was broken. The pale lemon cane of its seat had snapped, and the octagonal tracery was unraveling. I don’t know what happened. It was that way when I found it at the town dump. “It just wears out sometimes,” Curcio said. Or someone with a big wallet in their back pocket takes a seat a few too many times — and pop! The delicate tension snaps. It happens to the best caning in the world.

The shattered cane ran in and out of more than a hundred holes, each the width of a kitchen skewer, around the rim of the seat, twining in and out of some of them three or four times. I could not bring myself to rip it out. But for Curcio, the act held no sacrilege. When she rips it out, it’s because she can put it back together.

Repairing what’s broken is far from mainstream at the moment. Many of us live in what’s been called a throwaway culture, in which everything from bedsheets to phones to furniture is given up for lost at the first sign of wear, with devastating environmental consequences. Part of the problem is that so much stuff is of such poor quality. Since the rise of mass production, manufacturers have purposely degraded their own products so consumers will have to buy replacements, a policy called planned obsolescence.

Even things that could last, things that could be useful for decades more, get swept up in our collective sense — carefully cultivated by companies that sell us stuff — that convenience trumps all. 

How many times have you looked at something broken and felt relieved to toss it out, with the promise of a fresh one arriving in tomorrow’s mail?

It was not all that long ago that things were different. Curcio’s grandfather and father ran a chair factory in Gardiner, Mass. She learned to cane before she was 20 years old, and people would often call the factory and ask for repairs. She was game, and she’d have them bring the piece by so she could take a look. She made a career of waiting tables; she’s retired now. But she will still fix your chair. She’s part of an army of people who can look at something broken and see a way forward.

Captive to consumerism:  Peter Mui is another. When he was a child, his father gave him a broken alarm clock to work on. As a student at MIT, he noticed that the yard sales of Cambridge were littered with things that could be fixed, but weren’t. “It’s amazing how simple a lot of repair is,” says Mui, founder of the nonprofit FixIt Clinic, which since 2009 has hosted community events where volunteer fixers are matched with those in need of a repair. Fix a few vacuum cleaners and you’ll start to understand the common problems (a clog in a hose or filter is almost always the culprit when suction is bad, he says). He has seen many a hair dryer with a burnt-out thermal fuse roar to life again.

Fix a few more things, though, and you may start to feel uneasy at just how readily people throw away what they own. 

To Mui, now a hardware and software engineer in Berkeley, Calif., throwaway culture encourages a devaluing of our own lives. It took hours to earn the money to buy something. If someone fails to even look for a repair, how little must that time mean, in the end?

In places where the memory of being able to afford less is fresher, solutions are more commonplace. In the town where I used to live in China, there was a street where most anything could be fixed. Electric scooter mechanics worked miracles while you waited. A seamstress with a heavy-duty sewing machine repaired tears in suitcases and drapes. In the middle of the street was the computer repair shop, whose owner maintained an elaborate collection of spare parts. He’d pop the bottom off my laptop and rummage about while eating dinner and chatting with his daughter. I was enchanted by his nonchalance, the ease with which he maneuvered the world of circuits and wires. The more I’ve thought about it since, the more I think that confidence is what unites people who fix things. They have faith that there is a way that doesn’t involve the garbage heap.

That faith should be more widespread, believes Mui, who has become an activist for repair. Activists are needed, because companies that make cars, electronics, and appliances, to name a few products, have a vested interest in making repair hard. Case in point: More than two years ago, voters in Massachusetts passed a law making it mandatory for car manufacturers to give local independent repair shops access to cars’ digital diagnostics, so that they can assess problems and make repairs. But, car industry groups have fought the bill, aiming to keep cars’ data the sole province of corporate dealerships. A recent federal court decision holds that carmakers will have to provide limited access, but this is a substantial weakening of the Massachusetts bill.

“There are numerous ways items are designed now to thwart repair and hold you captive to the manufacturer’s ecosystem,” Mui says. The methods can seem absurd: Printers often have sensors that make it impossible to use ink cartridges from any source except the manufacturer. “For a while,” he said, “Epson ink-jet printers had an internal counter where the printer would simply stop printing after a certain number of pages.” (In my opinion the HP printers have similar weird internal monitoring systems!  I went through three expensive HP printers in two years.)

People who want to be able to care for their belongings — the “right to repair,” as this idea is known — will have to fight for it.

Persistence with a toaster:  There are ways — despite the pervasive pressure to do otherwise — to take control. On a warm day in July, in the dim basement of a Jamaica Plain branch library, a long line of people bearing toasters, phones, and drills throngs around a table headed by Susan Cascino, the City of Boston’s head of recycling. At each table around the room sits a volunteer fixer, a person possessed of screwdrivers and know-how. This is the latest instantiation of Boston’s traveling FixIt Clinic, which will meet every few weeks into November. In my hands is a leather shoe whose seam has burst, and Cascino hands me off to Kathryn Flaherty, over whose table an elaborately bobbined sewing machine holds sway.

I don’t know how to sew leather, but Kathryn is not bothered in the least. She hauls out a tiny box filled with leather-sewing tools and shows me how to use them. She jokes that in her house, she fixes anything physical; her husband, a programmer, fixes software. On her finger is a steel ring, lined with cogs.

No sooner is my seam complete — a repair that had been sitting around the house for months, it takes me all of 10 minutes — than I stand up and see behind me a Cuisinart toaster. The stainless steel casing has been lifted off, and a man named Marc Benador is running his fingers over the metal rails underneath. There are two slots for toast, with levers to lower the bread. The lever on the left stays down when you push it, as you’d expect. The lever on the right does not, fumbling weakly at the bottom and sliding back up.

Something comes over me and I cannot leave this toaster alone. Debbie Benador, Marc’s wife, shines a flashlight into the slots from above. The innards of the toaster are a pinball machine of metal rods and plastic hooks, dotted with small green circuit boards. It’s possible that the hook on the lever and the hook at the base aren’t meeting, Marc suggests. He gently bends a rail to see if he can bring the hook closer to its mate. No cigar. He files down the base so it tilts inward a bit more. Still not catching.

While the toaster’s owner, Ben Dewey, runs home to get some compressed air — maybe crumbs are getting in the way? — I work the lever up and down. I barely notice when he returns because I am absorbed in aiming the flashlight so I can watch the hooks as they move through a gap in the stainless steel casing.

Up and down, up and down — there they go, these little pieces of plastic, made to break, made to force Dewey to go online, click a button to get a new one, forget this toaster ever existed. I feel suddenly a bit depressed; I’ve spent 45 minutes understanding the inside of a toaster, and for what?

Then I notice something. I can’t say exactly what, but I can see that the hooks are bumping against each other on the way down and sliding past each other on the way up. I keep moving the lever, jostling it ever so slightly, and — they catch. I release the lever and try again. They catch again. I look at Dewey and Marc, who are discussing something, and I point at the toaster. I am almost chagrined that I can’t make the lever do what we’ve been watching it do all morning — I don’t know how I did it, but I fixed it.

Dewey is delighted. So are the Benadors and Cascino, who hands Marc a bike bell bolted to a two-by-four: Every time something gets fixed, someone triumphantly rings the bell and the room cheers. So far this year, says Cascino, about 70 to 80 percent of objects brought into the FixIt Clinics have been repaired. Marc rings the bell for the Cuisinart toaster, and I walk out in a golden haze.

As I drive to Curcio’s house the next day, I realize that when I pick up the chair — its cane taut and beautiful again, whole — I’ll be able to tell her I did it, too. I fixed something! 

Veronique Greenwood is a science writer who contributes frequently to Globe Ideas.

*Maine Writer P.S.  "planned obsolesce" a new phrase for the day!😊

Maine poverty in a Pulitzer

Maine is beautiful but it's also poor. Although nearly all calendar views of the beautiful state of Maine depict idyllic beauty and the magnificent rocky coast, there is also a poverty side of Maine, hidden from view, but poignantly revealed in this essay: 

Strider Wolf and his brother Gallagher, in a Pulitzer Award photo taken in rural Maine by Jessica Rinaldi

A Poignant Tableau and a Pulitzer - nice writing by Jesse Ellison, contributing editor to Downeast.com The Magazine of Maine.

Born into poverty in rural Maine, Strider Wolf was only 2 years old when his mother's boyfriend nearly beat him to death.  By age 5, he and his younger brother, Gallagher, were in the custody of their already overburdened grandparents, living in Oxford, Maine under constant threat of eviction.  Journalist Sarah Schweitzer and photographer Jessica Rinaldi sent four months with the family for their 2015, Boston Globe story, "The Life and Times of Strider Wolf."  If you haven't read it, consider putting down this magazine and doing so; it is a raw, intimate, and affecting a portrait of rural poverty in America as anything you will read.

Last year, Rinaldi won the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for the photos that accompanied the piece, including the memorable shot of Strider and Gallagher on the back of an abandoned Ford, staring at the moon.  It was the first time the award has recognized a photo series taken in Maine.

"By the time they got evicted - the night the moon photo was taken - we were entrenched," remembers Rinaldi.  "It wasn't so weird anymore that we were there with a notebook and cameras and everything. It was a nuts day. Everybody was jut scrambling.  The adults were so focused on trying to salvage their things, the boys were kind of left to their own devices and running wild a little bit. They were kids; exhausted, running around, being nuts."  Strider and Gallagher ran out to see a train pass on tracks nearby and, on their way back, stopped to play on the truck carriage.  In the photo, Strider is holding broken auto hoses to his eyes, like binoculars.  "What's on the moon?," he wondered, aloud.

The moment, to me, it felt so hopeful," she says.  "Nothing is working for this kid and yet he's still a did.  He can still pull something broken from the car, put it up to his eyes, and look at the moon. That's hopefulness, that's childhood. And at the same time, it's two kids standing on a broken car that's not going anywhere."

Even apart from its heartbreaking context, it's a tension between stasis and wide-eyed wonder that may resonate with anyone who looks back on a rural Maine upbringing.

The response to Schweitzer and Rinaldi's feature was enormous.  "We hoped that this story would do something, generate some sort of reaction," Rinaldi said, "but in the end, we didn't know. We thought, 'Will anyone really care?' ".

They did.  Globe readers donated tens of thousands of dollars.  The newspaper set up a trust and a GoFundMe campaign raised another $20,000.  Last summer, for the first time, Strider went to summer camp.  - Jesse Ellison, Contributing Editor