A recipe quite literally taken to the grave?

That’s the foundation for creator Rosie Grant’s ongoing archival project turned cookbook To Die For . And it’s exactly how it sounds.

Apropos for Spooky Season, the book collects “gravestone recipes” so synonymous with departed loved ones they’re immortalized on their headstones. It celebrates the legacies of ordinary folks who did extraordinary things. They were teachers or coaches, the local dentist, the neighbor everybody knew, and they all showed love through cooking for their communities.

What began as a light curiosity turned into a larger, more emotional realization around identity, place, and what we leave behind.

Over the past five and a half years since starting her TikTok and Instagram accounts under the username ghostly.archive during a digital archives internship at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC, Grant’s travels have taken her across the United States—as far as Nome, Alaska—as well as Nova Scotia, to visit their final resting places…