Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Iowa: A Love of Food and Family (with Rosie Grant) | Episode 90

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Iowa: A Love of Food and Family (with Rosie Grant) | Episode 90 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Rosie Grant: I thought it was the coolest thing.
• 0:01
  Rosie Grant: It looks like an open cookbook.
• 0:03
  Rosie Grant: You walk up to it and like it's a pedestal.
• 0:05
  Rosie Grant: It looks like an open stone book on a pedestal and her ingredients are written out on it.
• 0:10
  Rosie Grant: And I just thought, I wonder what that tastes like.
• 0:12
  Rosie Grant: So I cooked it and I put it on TikTok and um it went super viral overnight.
• 0:20
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:28
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:31
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:42
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:51
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:58
  Crista Cowan: When you're listening to this, Christmas is just one week away.
• 1:03
  Crista Cowan: So maybe this year it's a little late to start thinking about what to get people for the holidays.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: But you can start planning now for next year.
• 1:13
  Crista Cowan: And my guest today has a really unique perspective that I think might give you some ideas about gifts you can give.
• 1:22
  Crista Cowan: As you gather for the holidays.
• 1:24
  Crista Cowan: One of the things that I love about that is the way that we gather around food.
• 1:30
  Crista Cowan: And food plays such an important role in so many holidays.
• 1:34
  Crista Cowan: Part of the reason I think why it does and why it's so important to us, why it's so important to me is because of the way that that food connects with memories.
• 1:45
  Crista Cowan: Every Christmas we make wassel and minestroni soup and my grandmother's spice cookies.
• 1:52
  Crista Cowan: And we remember the people who've left us, and we look around the table at the people who are still with us, and we try to remember to collect the stories to lean into the connection and to preserve those recipes for the next generation.
• 2:10
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Rosie Grant, and she has written a cookbook, but this isn't just any cookbook.
• 2:18
  Crista Cowan: This is a book of stories about how those people and their memories connected them with their communities.
• 2:26
  Crista Cowan: One story in particular that you're going to hear connects us to the state of Iowa.
• 2:32
  Crista Cowan: And the stories of the people from Iowa and the coincidences that happen as Rosie goes there are worth listening to.
• 2:42
  Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Rosie Grant.
• 2:44
  Crista Cowan: Well, Rosie, I'm so glad you're here.
• 2:46
  Crista Cowan: I'm so excited to talk about your cookbook.
• 2:49
  Crista Cowan: But before we do, I'd just love to know a little bit more about you.
• 2:53
  Crista Cowan: Um, where are you from?
• 2:54
  Crista Cowan: And tell me about where you're living now and tell me about you.
• 2:59
  Rosie Grant: I would love to.
• 3:01
  Rosie Grant: Um, well, I am from Virginia, and I I got my library science degree at the University of Maryland.
• 3:09
  Rosie Grant: So the DC, Maryland, Virginia is where I call home.
• 3:12
  Rosie Grant: And I'm currently living in Los Angeles.
• 3:14
  Rosie Grant: I work at UCLA in the Center for the Study of Women.
• 3:18
  Crista Cowan: Very cool.
• 3:19
  Crista Cowan: I grew up in Los Angeles.
• 3:20
  Crista Cowan: So yeah, I love that's my home very much so.
• 3:24
  Crista Cowan: It's the best.
• 3:26
  Crista Cowan: So fun.
• 3:27
  Rosie Grant: So why library science?
• 3:29
  Rosie Grant: Oh man, I think everyone, the world would be a better place if we all took some library science classes.
• 3:35
  Rosie Grant: It was literally a whole program of mostly librarians paying for themselves in school to be better librarians.
• 3:43
  Rosie Grant: And they're already, I think, the best librarians, but they were like, how do we be more helpful to people in my community?
• 3:50
  Rosie Grant: And I was working at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
• 3:54
  Rosie Grant: And I was doing communications and their social media and a lot of digital, sort of digital media.
• 4:01
  Rosie Grant: And I became really interested in our archives, and I wanted to know more about preservation, how to work with digital archives.
• 4:08
  Rosie Grant: And so a lot of archives and library programs are under the same umbrella.
• 4:13
  Rosie Grant: So you do an MLIS, a library science degree, and you get to take archive classes within that.
• 4:19
  Rosie Grant: And I just was obsessed with community archives.
• 4:23
  Rosie Grant: I think they're so great.
• 4:24
  Rosie Grant: So this was very much born out of that.
• 4:28
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 4:29
  Crista Cowan: Librarians are kind of like the fairy godmothers of their communities.
• 4:32
  Crista Cowan: Like I remember as a kid going to story time and just looking up to the librarian like she was just this magical person because she had access to all these books and knowledge and she always had the answers.
• 4:46
  Rosie Grant: So true.
• 4:46
  Rosie Grant: My uncle was a librarian, and I he was my biggest hero as a kid.
• 4:51
  Rosie Grant: He loves Halloween and loved his library, and he even volunteer, he's retired now, but still volunteers at his local library.
• 4:58
  Rosie Grant: And I just think they're the best.
• 5:00
  Rosie Grant: They're like, you know, free community spaces that people can learn whatever they need to do.
• 5:05
  Rosie Grant: And I'm just, yeah, of course, they are the fairy godmothers with access to all the books, which is what's more magical than that.
• 5:13
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 5:13
  Crista Cowan: So I mean archivists.
• 5:15
  Crista Cowan: So as a genealogist, archivists, of course, have always had a special place in my heart.
• 5:20
  Crista Cowan: And my first job here at Ancestry 21, almost 22 years ago, was uh content acquisition.
• 5:27
  Crista Cowan: So I got to work with directly with the archivists, identifying what collections they had that Ancestry could digitize and publish online.
• 5:36
  Crista Cowan: And so I just really grew to appreciate that community so much.
• 5:41
  Rosie Grant: Ah, they were great.
• 5:42
  Rosie Grant: It was very funny being in the library and archives classes.
• 5:45
  Rosie Grant: You could tell what were the librarian classes and what were the archive ones.
• 5:49
  Rosie Grant: The librarians would be like, how do we get all of our stuff out there to people?
• 5:53
  Rosie Grant: And the archivists were like, people keep touching the stuff.
• 5:56
  Rosie Grant: How do we make sure it'll last 100, 200 years?
• 6:00
  Rosie Grant: Because everyone keeps touching all the stuff, which is so great.
• 6:03
  Rosie Grant: And yeah, archivists, I have so much appreciation for the like technique that they have.
• 6:08
  Rosie Grant: And of course, yeah, with genealogy, it's everything for saving our history.
• 6:12
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:13
  Crista Cowan: So tell me a little bit about how you went from being in a library and archives program to working at a university.
• 6:20
  Crista Cowan: What was that transition all about?
• 6:23
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, it was definitely, I mean, I love working at a university.
• 6:26
  Rosie Grant: I worked at the Department of English at University of Maryland while I was there.
• 6:31
  Rosie Grant: They have a very generous um staff, like reciprocal uh agreement so you can get free grad classes, which is quite nice.
• 6:40
  Rosie Grant: Um, so that was what paid for my MLIS program.
• 6:42
  Rosie Grant: And also working through a university has been so nice for the sake of their the university library is incredible.
• 6:50
  Rosie Grant: Um, both at UMD and then when I moved over to UCLA, um literally one of the best.
• 6:55
  Rosie Grant: So when it came to studying cemeteries and cemetery archives, it's been there's nothing better between if UCLA doesn't have it, then the interlibrary alone will have it.
• 7:06
  Rosie Grant: Um, but as far as within the death archive space, so as part of my program, I had to do a cemetery internship, or I should say I had to do an internship, not necessarily at a cemetery, but that's where I ended up.
• 7:18
  Rosie Grant: And it really put me behind the scenes of how some archives programs work and particularly death archives.
• 7:24
  Rosie Grant: And so continuing on, I moved to Los Angeles after I graduated because my partner wanted to work in the entertainment industry industry business, all of that stuff.
• 7:35
  Rosie Grant: Um, and ECLA was hiring in the women's center.
• 7:38
  Rosie Grant: And so honestly, it's just been continuing to learn and grow in these areas.
• 7:43
  Rosie Grant: I get to audit classes on community archives.
• 7:46
  Rosie Grant: They have some of the top faculty and thought people in this area.
• 7:51
  Rosie Grant: And so it's just been a really welcoming space for continuing to learn about these things.
• 7:56
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 7:57
  Crista Cowan: You mentioned your internship, and that I think it's how you got into cemeteries.
• 8:02
  Crista Cowan: Tell me a little bit about how that all went down.
• 8:06
  Rosie Grant: Well, it was not exactly what I would have expected going into the library science program.
• 8:11
  Rosie Grant: I thought I would be probably interning at a library somewhere, and it was during the pandemic, it was 2021.
• 8:18
  Rosie Grant: And so in Washington, DC, quite a lot of the spaces and internships in person had temporarily stopped because there was just so much chaos happening.
• 8:27
  Rosie Grant: Um, unfortunately, cemeteries were busier than ever.
• 8:31
  Rosie Grant: And so they had opened up this um archives internship for the sake of digitizing a lot of their markers and creating this sort of online tour of some of their more famous residents there that they already had in-person tours for.
• 8:46
  Rosie Grant: So it was a lot of wandering around looking for these gravestones, using find a grave.
• 8:51
  Rosie Grant: Um we have an app.
• 8:52
  Rosie Grant: So the cemetery itself has an app that's pretty good and it's up to date.
• 8:57
  Rosie Grant: Um, so if you're trying to find someone, it helps for genealogy reasons.
• 9:01
  Rosie Grant: We have a cemetery archivist who is this fabulous storyteller named Dale Dooley.
• 9:07
  Rosie Grant: And she's just tells one story after another of the folks buried there.
• 9:11
  Rosie Grant: And it was a very eye-opening experience because I love cemeteries, but I knew very little about the death industry.
• 9:18
  Crista Cowan: And so what cemetery was that that you did your internship with?
• 9:23
  Rosie Grant: It was Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., which is a fabulous.
• 9:28
  Rosie Grant: People ever get to go to DC and go on a tour there.
• 9:31
  Rosie Grant: Um, they have tons of tours.
• 9:33
  Rosie Grant: It's very welcoming to the community.
• 9:35
  Rosie Grant: They have an apiary, so you can get cemetery honey there.
• 9:38
  Rosie Grant: They have programs, events, a death doula.
• 9:41
  Rosie Grant: Um, they have a preservation team, they have a very popular dog walking program.
• 9:46
  Rosie Grant: And it is like a cemetery very welcoming to the living to come and be connected to people who are buried there.
• 9:53
  Crista Cowan: And that's so interesting because I think we've become a society where cemeteries are almost off limits in some cases, but cemeteries used to be very much public spaces.
• 10:04
  Rosie Grant: It's so true.
• 10:04
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, I think I get that comment a lot of like, oh, you shouldn't go, like, unless you're visiting your grandparent, don't go to a cemetery, which I totally understand the like, you know, obviously follow the cemetery rules and those are posted at the front for a reason.
• 10:19
  Rosie Grant: Um, and there's ways to respectfully visit cemeteries, but I definitely feel like, yeah, it's it's sad to see of like a disconnect.
• 10:27
  Rosie Grant: And I think for the safety of a lot of cemeteries, it's better when the community is connected to them.
• 10:32
  Rosie Grant: And the DC area has actually lost several cemeteries that, you know, eventually they stopped having active burials.
• 10:39
  Rosie Grant: And so it was very expensive to do upkeep.
• 10:42
  Rosie Grant: And then the dis the local community became disconnected, and then eventually they turned into a parking lot or a shopping mall.
• 10:49
  Rosie Grant: And um, in some cases the people were relocated, in some cases they weren't.
• 10:53
  Rosie Grant: And so I think it is a preservation method to bring in the community to care about the space.
• 10:59
  Rosie Grant: Um, and yeah, so in any case, when you think about the early cemeteries, the rural cemeteries, the people who would picnic in them and go out for the weekends.
• 11:08
  Rosie Grant: And yeah, um, you know, maybe we'll go back to that someday, but it definitely feels like there's a disconnect from how it used to be.
• 11:15
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:16
  Crista Cowan: I've I've loved cemeteries since I was a kid.
• 11:20
  Crista Cowan: Um, I think some of it stems from the fact that my birthday is the day after Halloween.
• 11:24
  Crista Cowan: And so, you know, even though I'm not Hispanic, I grew up in Los Angeles, fifth generation Los Angelino, and very much connected to the Mexican culture there.
• 11:34
  Crista Cowan: And Day of the Dead is a big deal for them.
• 11:37
  Crista Cowan: Um, and so having a birthday that is the first day of Diodoles Muertos is um maybe had something to do with it.
• 11:43
  Crista Cowan: But then also we lived near a cemetery, a pretty large one in our community, and the shortcut to get to the school bus was through the cemetery.
• 11:51
  Crista Cowan: And so there was never any like fear or um, you know, it wasn't about being spooky or scaring each other.
• 11:57
  Crista Cowan: It was just this really peaceful place.
• 12:00
  Crista Cowan: And I think probably my connection to family history played a role in that as well.
• 12:04
  Crista Cowan: But when you kind of triangulate all of those things, cemeteries have always been just a really lovely place for me.
• 12:12
  Crista Cowan: And I love visiting and I still picnic there, you know, and put flowers on graves and sometimes just wander through the cemetery and read tombstones.
• 12:22
  Crista Cowan: And every time I go to a new place, as a matter of fact, I was just in uh where was I?
• 12:27
  Crista Cowan: Just a few weeks ago.
• 12:28
  Crista Cowan: I was um uh on a business trip and we had some time before our flight.
• 12:32
  Crista Cowan: And so we looked up the local cemetery and we pulled up find a grave and thought, who needs photos of what and how can we help?
• 12:39
  Crista Cowan: And and and I love that.
• 12:42
  Crista Cowan: Like I love that that I've always felt that connection.
• 12:45
  Crista Cowan: So I love hearing when people get just as excited or just as passionate about cemeteries as I do.
• 12:52
  Rosie Grant: That is the most iconic way to wait for a flight I've ever heard, volunteering to do some find a grave research for folks.
• 13:00
  Rosie Grant: I love that so, so much.
• 13:02
  Rosie Grant: And I love that you also get to go even from like a young age, traveling to your bus.
• 13:07
  Rosie Grant: My high school was similar.
• 13:08
  Rosie Grant: I would cut through the local cemetery because my my house was on one side and the high school was on the other side of the cemetery.
• 13:15
  Rosie Grant: So I would walk through it.
• 13:16
  Rosie Grant: And it was really, it wasn't like it was just beautiful.
• 13:19
  Rosie Grant: It was a very place.
• 13:20
  Rosie Grant: And it makes, as a younger person, it made it a little easier of just physically being there, made it less scary than if you never go there other than for funerals.
• 13:29
  Rosie Grant: It becomes so taboo or you know, a heavier place.
• 13:33
  Rosie Grant: Um, and yeah, there's no place that celebrates like food and death together like Los Angeles.
• 13:39
  Rosie Grant: I feel like their deodelaus Marchist events are absolutely amazing.
• 13:44
  Crista Cowan: So you've had this interest in cemeteries, it sounds like maybe your whole life as well, not just because of this university project that you engaged in.
• 13:53
  Crista Cowan: But when did your interest turn to the recipes?
• 13:57
  Rosie Grant: The internship happened in 2021.
• 13:59
  Rosie Grant: And yeah, it was definitely a lifelong interest in cemeteries, even if I wasn't really aware of how the behind the scenes work.
• 14:07
  Rosie Grant: Um, I should also say my parents are both ghost tour guides to that desktop in the family.
• 14:13
  Rosie Grant: Um, so I definitely had grown up going to a lot of them, but even despite that, so I'd been to quite a lot of cemeteries by the time 2021 rolled around, but I had never seen a gravestone recipe.
• 14:25
  Rosie Grant: And even working in the cemetery, I was so unfamiliar about the, you know, huge variety of memorials and gravestone types there were out there.
• 14:34
  Rosie Grant: You know, anything from the classic zinc-based gravestone to really funny quotes, to photos, to um, you know, unusual statues, like anything that was important to a person you can see on their gravestone.
• 14:49
  Rosie Grant: So I was just in general, like very, it was very eye-opening to see that.
• 14:53
  Rosie Grant: And I had started a TikTok account as part of the library science program.
• 14:57
  Rosie Grant: And we basically, it was in a class, we had to post about a niche topic.
• 15:02
  Rosie Grant: And so my professor was like, you should make it about your cemetery internship.
• 15:06
  Rosie Grant: And I was like, is there an audience for that?
• 15:08
  Rosie Grant: And there definitely is.
• 15:10
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 15:10
  Rosie Grant: You know, lots of TAFO files online, particularly like, yeah, social media is a huge area for cemetery folks who love preservation work or love history, um, or even just the art of a cemetery.
• 15:23
  Rosie Grant: And so I had been featuring first just my own cemetery of, you know, some of the more unusual memorials.
• 15:29
  Rosie Grant: And then I moved on to Washington, D.C.
• 15:31
  Rosie Grant: in general, then Maryland and Virginia.
• 15:34
  Rosie Grant: And then it was just really any interesting gravestone that I learned about, I would talk about just because I found it so cool and interesting that people decided to do this.
• 15:43
  Rosie Grant: And it was about October 2021-ish that I learned about the grave of a woman named Naomi who has a spritz cookie recipe on her gravestone.
• 15:54
  Rosie Grant: And I learned about it from a blog post called Atlas Obscura.
• 15:58
  Rosie Grant: They have a really lovely, they have lots of good cemetery stories that are really well researched.
• 16:03
  Rosie Grant: And it was just, I thought it was the coolest thing.
• 16:06
  Rosie Grant: It looks like an open cookbook.
• 16:07
  Rosie Grant: And you walk up to it and like it's a pedestal, it looks like an open stone book on a pedestal, and her ingredients are written out on it.
• 16:15
  Rosie Grant: And I just thought, I wonder what that tastes like.
• 16:17
  Rosie Grant: So I cooked it and I put it on TikTok, and um it went super viral overnight in a very, I found a surprising way, um, just because so many people were really engaging with food and death on a personal level.
• 16:32
  Rosie Grant: Um, there were lots of people who were like, oh wow, like what would I put on my gravestone if I had a recipe?
• 16:37
  Rosie Grant: Um, but then a lot of people were saying things like, you know, my mom died two years ago.
• 16:42
  Rosie Grant: Uh, I still make her cake for both of our birthdays.
• 16:45
  Rosie Grant: And it helps me feel like she's still with me.
• 16:48
  Rosie Grant: Or, you know, my dad died a few years ago.
• 16:50
  Rosie Grant: I make his chili every weekend and things like that of like just these really personalized food and death stories.
• 16:57
  Rosie Grant: And so while I was learning more about Naomi, I learned there were a few other people who had done this who had been featured different places of the internet, some in local news, some in blogs, one on Reddit, one on Twitter.
• 17:08
  Rosie Grant: And it was just like basically, I was like, I wonder what all of these recipes taste like.
• 17:13
  Rosie Grant: And so I just started basically documenting them and clicking the recipes.
• 17:18
  Rosie Grant: And that's kind of how the project got started.
• 17:21
  Crista Cowan: Because if it's important enough to engrave on your tombstone, you you would hope it's good.
• 17:25
  Rosie Grant: Yeah.
• 17:25
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, exactly.
• 17:31
  Crista Cowan: And I love that.
• 17:32
  Crista Cowan: I love that this whole convergence of like the pandemic leading you to this path and this opportunity to make this, you know, make these things that you're finding, and then the rise of TikTok that just took off during COVID, obviously, and got that attention.
• 17:50
  Crista Cowan: Um, did you feel like kind of forced into this in any way?
• 17:55
  Crista Cowan: Or have you joyfully headed down this path of tombstone recipes?
• 18:00
  Rosie Grant: Oh, joyfully, but also surprisingly so.
• 18:02
  Rosie Grant: I think with every recipe, I've been like, wow, three, that's crazy.
• 18:07
  Rosie Grant: And then four, what?
• 18:09
  Rosie Grant: That's insane.
• 18:11
  Rosie Grant: Now I'm at 50 and I keep being like, there's 50 of them.
• 18:15
  Rosie Grant: So it's something I couldn't have like planned for because it was, I mean, I should say all of them have been crowdsourced.
• 18:22
  Rosie Grant: They've all been either if they weren't featured online, then someone had sent them to me.
• 18:27
  Rosie Grant: Or when I was at about eight recipes, um, the family started reaching out from different folks around the country.
• 18:33
  Rosie Grant: And they were like, oh my gosh, I thought my mom was the only one who decided to do this recipe.
• 18:39
  Rosie Grant: Or, you know, my mother-in-law had this carrot cake recipe.
• 18:42
  Rosie Grant: And so that's been really cool.
• 18:44
  Rosie Grant: Of like, you know, both with families and with like just different folks online who were visiting cemeteries.
• 18:50
  Rosie Grant: Um, so I I mean, for me, I'm I can't, I feel like I'm like, did I, how did I manifest this?
• 18:56
  Rosie Grant: Because I could never have planned for something like this, but I've always loved cemeteries, I've always loved sort of these like death positive spaces.
• 19:04
  Rosie Grant: But I've also like I was a creative writing minor and English major in college, and I did I studied food writing and food memoirs, and food memoirs are one of my favorite styles of books.
• 19:14
  Rosie Grant: And so I'm like, for these two things, I would never have imagined to, you know, converge.
• 19:20
  Rosie Grant: And so I'm just like, how did this happen?
• 19:23
  Rosie Grant: But I'm not mad about it.
• 19:26
  Crista Cowan: And it's so interesting because it sounds like you started like reflecting back out to the world, this discovery that you were making.
• 19:33
  Crista Cowan: But in some ways, because of the rise in popularity of both your TikTok account and now with the cookbook, like you now maybe are influencing culture.
• 19:43
  Crista Cowan: Maybe there are people who are going to make this choice to put a recipe on their gravestone that never would have felt the permission to do that before.
• 19:50
  Rosie Grant: Yeah.
• 19:51
  Rosie Grant: So that has started happening and it's become a little bit of a chicken and the egg thing.
• 19:55
  Rosie Grant: And one of the questions, so I started, um I Think when I was around 20 recipes was when I first met Naomi's family and we cooked together.
• 20:05
  Rosie Grant: And I think that was very informative for me of how to kind of more formalize the process.
• 20:11
  Rosie Grant: Cause I think I'd been randomly just been like, oh wow, this is cool.
• 20:13
  Rosie Grant: Oh, this is how cool, how cool.
• 20:15
  Rosie Grant: And then I was like, okay, now I need to like really do a more formalized documentation, uh, reach out to because most of the ones in the beginning were families either featured already online or you know, their person was already online.
• 20:28
  Rosie Grant: But as new ones were coming in, and if it didn't come from the family, I needed to, of course, chat with them and get permission to include their person in the project.
• 20:37
  Rosie Grant: And then with that would usually come a uh oral history interview about their loved one.
• 20:43
  Rosie Grant: And so we would kind of, you know, have a phone call or a series of phone calls or Zoom calls.
• 20:47
  Rosie Grant: I would try to meet wherever they were at.
• 20:50
  Rosie Grant: And it just kind of kept growing from there.
• 20:53
  Rosie Grant: And I, yeah, I'm like, it was at every stage of it of the way, I was like, wow, this is so cool that this is we're at this stage of like, you know, a hundred interviews of different people from around the world and you know, the transcriptions, and this is more like the archiving side of this project.
• 21:09
  Rosie Grant: The tempting out of it.
• 21:12
  Rosie Grant: Um, but yeah, no, it was really it's been it's been so cool to kind of just see the like organic flow of it, um, because it definitely didn't start out that way.
• 21:21
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, nobody, nobody plans, I think, for this kind of a career, right?
• 21:25
  Rosie Grant: 100%.
• 21:27
  Crista Cowan: So was Naomi's family the first family that you connected with?
• 21:32
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, they were the first and on a couple of levels.
• 21:34
  Rosie Grant: So it was the first recipe I learned about, the first gravestone that I visited.
• 21:38
  Rosie Grant: Um, I was driving to New York with my mom pretty early on.
• 21:42
  Rosie Grant: I think it was still in the first year of the project.
• 21:45
  Rosie Grant: And I was like, oh, well, you know, I know about Naomi.
• 21:48
  Rosie Grant: I should visit her while we're in Brooklyn.
• 21:50
  Rosie Grant: And so I was thinking about what flowers to bring to her grave.
• 21:54
  Rosie Grant: And I didn't know what her favorite flower was.
• 21:57
  Rosie Grant: So I was like, well, you know, her cookies um feel very like this was obviously special to her.
• 22:02
  Rosie Grant: So I made her cookies and we enjoyed her cookies while visiting her.
• 22:06
  Rosie Grant: And then there's another woman named Connie who's buried just a little north of New York City.
• 22:10
  Rosie Grant: So I was like, well, if we're visiting Naomi, we should visit Connie.
• 22:13
  Rosie Grant: So we did the same thing.
• 22:15
  Rosie Grant: Um, so again, very organically of just like, well, just why not?
• 22:18
  Rosie Grant: And then eventually just turned into the thing of like, well, it felt really nice.
• 22:22
  Rosie Grant: And this was the place that was important to them.
• 22:23
  Rosie Grant: And I'm reading about them and I'm reading their obituaries, and then yes, I'm starting to meet with the family.
• 22:29
  Rosie Grant: So with Naomi's family, I got in contact with her son Richard, and they very kindly were down to meet at her grave um in Brooklyn, and I met with uh her son and then her granddaughter, and we cooked together and they told all of these stories, and that really changed.
• 22:48
  Rosie Grant: I mean, the recipe is great, I think all of them, and there's definitely like a cool, like, whoa, this came from a gravestone.
• 22:55
  Rosie Grant: Um, but more than anything, the stories of the person was like the real, that was like the good stuff where I was like, Oh, these people were so cool, and they each have very different stories.
• 23:05
  Rosie Grant: And so that was really important while reaching out to all the people of like who was the person behind this recipe.
• 23:11
  Rosie Grant: Uh and that probably took that took the most time to because some of the folks I would reach out to were just a little bit like, who?
• 23:19
  Rosie Grant: Right.
• 23:20
  Rosie Grant: And but yeah, so in any case, when it came to the interviews, um, and this was going back to your earlier question of like the chicken and the egg thing, of some of the later families that I was interviewing were saying things like, Oh, well, I I learned about this thing on TikTok.
• 23:35
  Rosie Grant: I just basically learned about other people who decided to do this, and so I too decided to do it.
• 23:41
  Rosie Grant: So they were basically everyone's inspired all of the other folks who have each done it, which has been really lovely of like food inspiring other people in their food.
• 23:50
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 23:51
  Rosie Grant: Wow, I love that.
• 23:52
  Crista Cowan: So at what point did you decide I'm gonna put this in it into a cookbook?
• 23:58
  Rosie Grant: Into a cookbook.
• 23:59
  Rosie Grant: Oh, so crazy seeing like a physical book being like I love it.
• 24:04
  Rosie Grant: I think for me, I um I mean it when we were at about maybe 10-ish recipes.
• 24:12
  Rosie Grant: Some editors started reaching out and they were like, hey, like uh, what are your thoughts on a cookbook?
• 24:17
  Rosie Grant: And I was like, I mean, I I don't know if there's more than 10.
• 24:21
  Rosie Grant: Is 10 enough for a cookbook?
• 24:22
  Rosie Grant: And they're like, no, let us know when you get to a hundred recipes.
• 24:25
  Rosie Grant: Oh I can't imagine that'll ever happen.
• 24:28
  Rosie Grant: But I connected with my current editor, Jacqueline at Herper Collins, and she I think understood the the spirit of the project a little bit more.
• 24:36
  Rosie Grant: And she was like, no, this won't be a traditional cookbook.
• 24:39
  Rosie Grant: This could be, of course, like the it's the it's a community archive of people, and these recipes represent all of these folks from all over the place.
• 24:48
  Rosie Grant: And so it would be, of course, the recipe.
• 24:50
  Rosie Grant: And there's this funny thing.
• 24:52
  Rosie Grant: So you know how like the the story before a lot of recipes that we'll see in blobs, um, it's called the head note, uh, which is very funny because I'm pulling from headstones.
• 25:01
  Rosie Grant: So it's like headnotes as like this sort of like, what's the story before the recipe?
• 25:07
  Rosie Grant: And for these ones, they're all from this gravestone.
• 25:09
  Rosie Grant: And so she she kind of understood that, like, in order to do this correctly, we needed to feature the people and of course get all the families um, you know, permissions and make sure everyone feels good about it and can review the drafts, get photos of the people.
• 25:23
  Rosie Grant: And then I needed to physically, in my mind, it was important to visit and document them as I went along.
• 25:29
  Rosie Grant: And so, anyways, so that yeah, it was when we were at 20 recipes, that's where we started, and we were like, well, if we can get to 40, then that'll be like a unusual bite-sized cookbook.
• 25:41
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 25:42
  Crista Cowan: Well, I have leafed through it and it is beautiful.
• 25:45
  Crista Cowan: Oh, and then I have I have read some parts of it and I am just so impressed.
• 25:50
  Crista Cowan: So, what I want to talk about actually is your dedication.
• 25:54
  Crista Cowan: You dedicated this to both of your grandmothers, which I think, again, as a genealogist and somebody for whom family connections are so important.
• 26:03
  Crista Cowan: I love that you did that.
• 26:05
  Crista Cowan: Tell me about them.
• 26:07
  Rosie Grant: Oh man, my grandmas were the best.
• 26:09
  Rosie Grant: I feel like, I mean, grandmas are awesome.
• 26:12
  Rosie Grant: I, you know, whatever.
• 26:13
  Rosie Grant: Grandmas are all people too, but I very much lucked out in the grandma department.
• 26:17
  Rosie Grant: I'm named after my grandmother, also named Rosemary Grant, and she um paid for my college.
• 26:23
  Rosie Grant: So she was very encouraging of me being an English major, which I know there's a lot of jokes these days of like, oh gosh, my kid wants to be an English major.
• 26:32
  Rosie Grant: Um, but she loved being an English major.
• 26:35
  Rosie Grant: She was an English and biology major at a time where a lot of folks from her generation weren't at the women were not getting college degrees.
• 26:43
  Rosie Grant: And she put herself through college.
• 26:45
  Rosie Grant: Um, and so intelligent, just a very sharp person.
• 26:49
  Rosie Grant: Um, definitely a more formal cook, like she loved Julia Child.
• 26:53
  Rosie Grant: She would really, you know, she would for us at the time in Virginia, like the fact that she would make like a paella or something, everyone was like, whoa.
• 27:00
  Rosie Grant: Um, and then on the flip side is my grandmother McCarthy, who I actually lived with in college, um, just because she uh my grandfather had passed away, and uh, she had a big house in Vienna, Virginia.
• 27:15
  Rosie Grant: And me and my cousins, we all grown up together.
• 27:17
  Rosie Grant: So we all lived in different rooms of the house with her, which was so fun.
• 27:21
  Rosie Grant: It was just a really, really lovely time.
• 27:24
  Rosie Grant: And I got so much time with her.
• 27:26
  Rosie Grant: And food was very important in her life, even though she wasn't really a fancy cook, she was very like, you know, like uh post-World War II, like uh meat and potatoes, like really simple eggs and toast coffee, breakfast, but she loved mealtime for like chatting with people and she loved going out to lunch with folks and having big dinners, and she hosted all the holidays.
• 27:49
  Rosie Grant: And so I think between the two of them, food and like connection and gathering was extremely important on both sides of my family.
• 27:56
  Rosie Grant: And I mean, yeah, I was thinking about them throughout the project.
• 28:00
  Rosie Grant: They both passed away right at the start of the project.
• 28:03
  Rosie Grant: Um, and you know, they both lived very long lives, which was wonderful.
• 28:08
  Rosie Grant: But I was thinking a lot about their food at their funerals.
• 28:11
  Rosie Grant: And so then here I was interviewing families about their loved ones, and they were talking about using that food to remember them goodbye and bring them back and bring their memories closer.
• 28:21
  Rosie Grant: And I was like, oh wow, like I feel that too.
• 28:25
  Rosie Grant: And I miss um, but whenever I eat like my grandma's yellow birthday cake that she would make for all of my birthdays, I feel like she's with me again.
• 28:33
  Rosie Grant: Um, so yeah, this was very much in the spirit of those two.
• 28:37
  Rosie Grant: I love that.
• 28:38
  Rosie Grant: Oh, and I love grandma's.
• 28:42
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 28:42
  Crista Cowan: I think about my own grandmothers, and neither of them were great cooks, but no, but but my my mom's mom used to make fresh lemonade and every time we would come to visit, she would have fresh lemonade for us.
• 28:58
  Crista Cowan: And I recently inherited the lemonade pitcher um that she used to serve it in, and it's not very big, but I keep my sourdough starter in it.
• 29:08
  Rosie Grant: Okay, amazing.
• 29:10
  Rosie Grant: That's awesome.
• 29:11
  Crista Cowan: Um, and then my other grandmother made these incredible spice cookies.
• 29:15
  Crista Cowan: They were like better than ginger snaps, like so good.
• 29:19
  Crista Cowan: And she would bake them ahead of time because she never knew when we would show up, and she would stick them in the freezer.
• 29:24
  Crista Cowan: And so she, so we always had not fresh out of the oven cookies, but frozen spice cookies, and they were so good.
• 29:32
  Crista Cowan: And so I just think like that that concept of food and connection.
• 29:37
  Crista Cowan: Like we walked in the door and one grandma's pulling out the lemonade and the other one's pulling out the cookies, like that was connection for them.
• 29:44
  Crista Cowan: And now it's memory for me.
• 29:47
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, and and I love that food has that power.
• 29:51
  Rosie Grant: Oh, that's so beautiful.
• 29:53
  Rosie Grant: I love that you got her jar and it's being used to cultivate something just as good.
• 29:58
  Rosie Grant: Like, yeah, so cool.
• 30:00
  Rosie Grant: Yeah.
• 30:00
  Rosie Grant: We love and I love, do you still have that the ginger cookie recipe?
• 30:05
  Crista Cowan: Not only do we have it, we laminated it on a block of wood with my grandma's picture and decorated it all Christmassy.
• 30:12
  Crista Cowan: And it is one of our Christmas decorations.
• 30:15
  Crista Cowan: Like we put it out at Christmas as part of our decoration.
• 30:19
  Rosie Grant: See it like there with you all.
• 30:20
  Rosie Grant: I love that.
• 30:22
  Crista Cowan: That's awesome.
• 30:23
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 30:24
  Crista Cowan: Well, let's talk a little bit about Christmas.
• 30:26
  Crista Cowan: So we're recording this episode right before um Halloween, which is appropriate for our conversation.
• 30:32
  Crista Cowan: But it's gonna air the week before Christmas.
• 30:35
  Crista Cowan: And in the cookbook, there is just this really lovely recipe that comes from the state of Iowa.
• 30:42
  Crista Cowan: So here on the podcast, we're doing this countdown to America 250.
• 30:47
  Crista Cowan: And when we were trying to figure out what represented Iowa, we actually came across your story about Maxine.
• 30:54
  Crista Cowan: And so I would love you to tell us all a little bit about Maxine.
• 30:59
  Rosie Grant: Oh my gosh.
• 31:00
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, well, so she was one of the first like OG gravestorm recipe people.
• 31:05
  Rosie Grant: And in fact, as I've been interviewing other people, they were inspired.
• 31:09
  Rosie Grant: They saw a photo of Maxine.
• 31:10
  Rosie Grant: Maxine, her Christmas grave uh went viral on the internet way before I came along.
• 31:16
  Rosie Grant: Um, and which is really funny because it is kind of like Cascade Falls, Iowa, is like pretty far away.
• 31:22
  Rosie Grant: It's like hours outside of Chicago and um beautiful town.
• 31:26
  Rosie Grant: And Maxine had grown up on a farm and a couple of kids, her and her husband were very interested in just giving back to their community.
• 31:35
  Rosie Grant: Um, she had a best friend named Odie, and the two would go shopping together.
• 31:40
  Rosie Grant: They would talk pretty much every single day, whether in person or on the phone.
• 31:43
  Rosie Grant: Their kids all grew up together.
• 31:45
  Rosie Grant: And when both of them passed away, they're both buried in the same cemetery.
• 31:50
  Rosie Grant: And when um when I went to go visit, I was gonna go meet with her daughter to visit uh Maxine's grave.
• 31:58
  Rosie Grant: They had another death in the family, so I wasn't able to meet with them.
• 32:01
  Rosie Grant: But I went to a local store just to pick up a Christmas plate to bring Maxine's cookies.
• 32:06
  Rosie Grant: I'd made her Christmas cookies and I was gonna bring them to her grave site.
• 32:09
  Rosie Grant: And the woman at the store who I chatted with was Odie's daughter.
• 32:14
  Rosie Grant: So the woman, Maxine's best friend, her daughter, worked at this store.
• 32:18
  Rosie Grant: And she was like, We love Maxine's cookies.
• 32:20
  Rosie Grant: We make them every year still.
• 32:22
  Rosie Grant: My kids love them, the whole family makes it.
• 32:25
  Rosie Grant: And the tradition in the family had been they would make them on Christmas Eve and hang them on the tree.
• 32:30
  Rosie Grant: And so you would wake up Christmas morning and you have these cookies hanging there.
• 32:34
  Rosie Grant: And in my own family, I have some nieces and nephews.
• 32:37
  Rosie Grant: We've done that since learning about this tradition.
• 32:39
  Rosie Grant: And my the kids in the family love this because they come to our house and there are all these cookies hanging on the tree.
• 32:46
  Crista Cowan: My producer did make Maxine's cookies, and so I'm so excited.
• 32:51
  Crista Cowan: I haven't tried them yet.
• 32:52
  Crista Cowan: I'm so excited to try one.
• 32:54
  Crista Cowan: That's awesome.
• 32:58
  Rosie Grant: Oh, they're so pretty.
• 33:00
  Crista Cowan: Oh my gosh, they're delicious too.
• 33:01
  Crista Cowan: Um, this is oh, I know.
• 33:04
  Crista Cowan: Look at her.
• 33:05
  Crista Cowan: She made like Christmas trees and stars.
• 33:08
  Crista Cowan: That's so nice.
• 33:09
  Crista Cowan: We leave we leave cookies out for Santa, but I've never heard of putting cookies on a tree.
• 33:13
  Crista Cowan: So I looked into it a little bit.
• 33:15
  Crista Cowan: Like that's a German tradition.
• 33:17
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 33:18
  Crista Cowan: And that area of Iowa was settled by a lot of German families.
• 33:23
  Crista Cowan: And so it makes sense that that would be something that they would do, but it was something I was not familiar with.
• 33:28
  Rosie Grant: Her it was something that she had adopted from her family.
• 33:31
  Rosie Grant: So it was just something that passed along.
• 33:33
  Rosie Grant: And I just think it's such a cool, it's such a cool tradition.
• 33:37
  Rosie Grant: Why does Santa get all the cookies?
• 33:39
  Rosie Grant: Right.
• 33:41
  Crista Cowan: And I love that you've kind of carried that into your family as you've learned about that.
• 33:46
  Crista Cowan: I think that's beautiful.
• 33:47
  Crista Cowan: Maxine, I understand, like really gave back to her community as well.
• 33:52
  Rosie Grant: Yeah.
• 33:52
  Rosie Grant: So she donated, her and her husband had a lot of land that they, because they had, you know, the farming land, and they eventually donated it to this youth program.
• 34:02
  Rosie Grant: Um and actually it's very, and there's another gravestone recipe not too far away from a woman named Winnie who actually volunteered at this same youth center.
• 34:13
  Rosie Grant: And so all of this land was donated basically to help kids.
• 34:18
  Rosie Grant: And it was just freely donated.
• 34:20
  Rosie Grant: I think it was part of like a some sort of raffle system just to raise money for this program.
• 34:26
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 34:27
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 34:28
  Crista Cowan: Um, and it's so interesting, like these little coincidences.
• 34:31
  Crista Cowan: I think sometimes we think about in some of these more rural places that people are so spread out and maybe not as connected.
• 34:38
  Crista Cowan: But I think that the importance of community in places like Iowa is particularly felt by those people.
• 34:44
  Crista Cowan: And so how lovely that Maxine and her husband did that.
• 34:48
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:49
  Rosie Grant: No, they seemed really special, just like very, very loving, very giving people.
• 34:54
  Rosie Grant: And yeah, so she, I mean, just seemed like such a generous person and wanted others to have this recipe.
• 35:00
  Rosie Grant: So it was important to put this onto her gravestone.
• 35:03
  Rosie Grant: So, like, you know, if you're passing by, you can get this really good cookie recipe.
• 35:08
  Rosie Grant: And I, yeah, there's so many like different like things and traditions that come out of all the different gravestones, but this is probably one of my favorites.
• 35:17
  Crista Cowan: Do you have other holiday traditions?
• 35:20
  Rosie Grant: In my own family, I mean, yes, Halloween is a big one for us personally.
• 35:25
  Rosie Grant: In the past, my uncle, who's a librarian, would host a big family Halloween party, and he would make uh mixtapes for everyone.
• 35:32
  Rosie Grant: This is like back in the 90s.
• 35:34
  Rosie Grant: We'd all get a Halloween mixtape.
• 35:36
  Rosie Grant: So we would get that in early October and get to listen year-round.
• 35:40
  Rosie Grant: Um, but it would be really like building up excitement.
• 35:43
  Rosie Grant: Picking up pumpkins and carving them was always a really big thing.
• 35:47
  Rosie Grant: And then I would say for Christmas and Thanksgiving, family was really big on doing like big gatherings and meals.
• 35:53
  Rosie Grant: We'd all meet up both of the grandparents' houses.
• 35:56
  Rosie Grant: Both of my grandmothers lived not too far away from each other in Virginia.
• 35:59
  Rosie Grant: So we'd usually go to one for lunch and then dinner for the other.
• 36:03
  Rosie Grant: And yeah, I love any sort of like gathering with family and loved ones around food.
• 36:08
  Rosie Grant: Like they're the best.
• 36:09
  Rosie Grant: Yeah.
• 36:11
  Rosie Grant: Right.
• 36:13
  Crista Cowan: Um, was that trip to visit Maxine?
• 36:15
  Crista Cowan: Was that the first time you had been to Iowa?
• 36:18
  Rosie Grant: It was the second.
• 36:19
  Rosie Grant: So the first time we went to Iowa was to visit another gravestone writ.
• 36:22
  Rosie Grant: I get to go to all of my states now, mostly for their cemeteries.
• 36:26
  Rosie Grant: I love that.
• 36:26
  Rosie Grant: Yeah.
• 36:27
  Rosie Grant: So there's a woman in the book who also in Iowa in Dow City named Deb Nelson, who was a local radio DJ host.
• 36:35
  Rosie Grant: And her gravestone has a cheese chip recipe on it, which is phenomenal.
• 36:40
  Rosie Grant: Um, hers was the really lovely case of her daughter who had actually reached out to me once the project had gotten going, and she was like, Oh my gosh, I thought my mom was the only one crazy enough to do this.
• 36:51
  Rosie Grant: So basically, when um when Deb died, there'd been this like phrase in their family that she would joke about.
• 36:58
  Rosie Grant: She would give out this cheese dip every Christmas and they would package it in a jar, and people would, you know, get to take their jars home with a sleeve of crackers, and then they'd have to return their jars to her so that they would get more of the cheese dip the following year.
• 37:11
  Rosie Grant: It was just like a fun family tradition that people would look forward to.
• 37:15
  Rosie Grant: Everyone said her cheese dip recipe was like the best, and they would always ask for it, and she would always say, like, yeah, you can have it over my grave, or something like that.
• 37:24
  Rosie Grant: So when she passed away, her family was like, I guess we have to put her recipe.
• 37:30
  Rosie Grant: This is what she said.
• 37:31
  Rosie Grant: And so her own friend, who was just like someone else in the community, is the local um gravestone carver.
• 37:38
  Rosie Grant: So she was the one who designed it.
• 37:40
  Rosie Grant: She worked for the family to pick the shape and you know, design the lettering and just get everything right for them.
• 37:47
  Rosie Grant: Um, and she said it's the first time that she had ever carved her gravestone recipe, which is really, really, really cool.
• 37:52
  Rosie Grant: So I went with and I met with Kate, her daughter, and we did a little tour around town.
• 37:58
  Rosie Grant: And literally everyone, the book starts with her section of being like, everyone has a Deb Nelson story, because we would go like five feet, and like another person would be like, I have a Deb Nelson story too.
• 38:09
  Rosie Grant: Like she was so beloved in her community.
• 38:12
  Crista Cowan: So in your book, you have some tips for people.
• 38:14
  Crista Cowan: Um obviously, we want people to buy the book and read it, but do you have just one or two that you could share with us?
• 38:22
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, absolutely.
• 38:23
  Rosie Grant: So um, again, this was very much inspired from community archives and um hearing of people who were like, oh my gosh, I, you know, I've I lost someone and I never got to get this information.
• 38:34
  Rosie Grant: So encouraging, I have 21 tips and questions to ask to document your own family food history.
• 38:41
  Rosie Grant: Um, I even have the book open right now.
• 38:43
  Rosie Grant: The first one, do we have any recipes that have been passed down through the generations?
• 38:47
  Rosie Grant: And the second one is where did our family or community come from and how has this influenced our food traditions?
• 38:54
  Rosie Grant: Um in my own family, you know, we were from Ireland, both sides of my family are from Ireland at different times.
• 39:00
  Rosie Grant: And so we we've even done we've done the Irish Wake with, you know, hanging and drinking and eating food with the person there with us.
• 39:09
  Rosie Grant: And I mean, obviously, we love our meat and potatoes.
• 39:13
  Rosie Grant: I feel like that's lasted.
• 39:14
  Rosie Grant: We love an Irish pub, we love Irish coffee.
• 39:17
  Rosie Grant: Um, and these were just traditions that we picked up from our grandparents.
• 39:21
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 39:22
  Crista Cowan: Um, my grandmother is very Irish and Scottish and German.
• 39:25
  Crista Cowan: That is her ethnic background.
• 39:27
  Crista Cowan: But I mentioned she grew up in Los Angeles and she grew up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.
• 39:33
  Crista Cowan: And so when she started raising her own family, it was tacos for Sunday dinner.
• 39:39
  Crista Cowan: And that has continued.
• 39:41
  Crista Cowan: So my she raised her kids that way every Sunday, Cowan Taco Sunday.
• 39:44
  Crista Cowan: And it was one of those things where like everybody knew the cowans were having tacos on Sunday, and so people would come for tacos and she would pan fry her own tortillas, and um like we season our meat with like authentic cumin and like it's this whole thing.
• 39:59
  Crista Cowan: My dad and uncle decided to continue that with their children.
• 40:03
  Crista Cowan: So we were raised with Cowan Taco Sunday.
• 40:06
  Crista Cowan: And now my brothers and some of my cousins, like we like we know on Sundays, wherever we are in the country and we're kind of spread out now, that Cowans are having tacos every Sunday.
• 40:17
  Rosie Grant: I'm so obsessed with that.
• 40:19
  Rosie Grant: That's like that is that's like Chef's Kiss.
• 40:22
  Rosie Grant: That's so beautiful.
• 40:23
  Rosie Grant: And I love so much.
• 40:24
  Rosie Grant: And it is cool.
• 40:25
  Rosie Grant: It's cool to think about how it's just asking questions of like, you know, for the next generation, where they're like, you know, oh, of course we do tacos Sundays, but of like, why do we do this?
• 40:35
  Rosie Grant: And where did this come from?
• 40:36
  Rosie Grant: And why do we bring in cumin and you know, these certain ingredients and how we we fry the the tacos and how the meat gets, you know, whatever the thing is.
• 40:46
  Rosie Grant: Oh, it's really cool to see of like, well, we got it from here.
• 40:49
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 40:49
  Crista Cowan: So even the way that like some of those food traditions don't just continue for generations, but evolve in some ways as well.
• 40:56
  Rosie Grant: Oh, I love that so much.
• 40:58
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, it's so food is so fun.
• 41:00
  Rosie Grant: Like, yeah, if you guys ever do an open house Sunday taco dinner, let me know.
• 41:03
  Rosie Grant: Okay.
• 41:05
  Crista Cowan: If you are in Utah over a weekend, you are you are invited.
• 41:08
  Rosie Grant: Thank you.
• 41:10
  Crista Cowan: I love this whole idea.
• 41:12
  Crista Cowan: I love the idea of food and death and the connection that those two things have.
• 41:16
  Crista Cowan: I love the concept of food and connection.
• 41:19
  Crista Cowan: Um, you know, gathering around the dinner table is such a thing that my parents felt was so important and my grandparents were felt was so important and it's so refreshing to see my brothers continue that with their children.
• 41:34
  Crista Cowan: And so that connection point with food, but then the memory that comes with food and flavors is so important as well.
• 41:44
  Crista Cowan: And so I just think it's so beautiful that you've taken this project on and that it's not just the recipes that you're sharing, but it that it's the stories of the people as well.
• 41:54
  Rosie Grant: Yeah, and thank you so much.
• 41:56
  Rosie Grant: And I'm so glad to hear your family and your siblings and like just everyone is getting to like food is just everything.
• 42:03
  Rosie Grant: And I remember being in a food writing class in college, and my professor was like, Yeah, food is everything, it connects to everything.
• 42:09
  Rosie Grant: And I'm like, well, it's not everything, right?
• 42:11
  Rosie Grant: Like it's not death.
• 42:13
  Rosie Grant: Um, but yeah, like I feel like the connections about it has been the most rewarding part.
• 42:18
  Rosie Grant: Like, you know, we all have our recipes, we all have our gatherings, and it just to me, like I'm like, oh, this is like the meaning of life.
• 42:25
  Rosie Grant: It's just being able to do this as much as we can.
• 42:28
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 42:28
  Crista Cowan: Well, in the book, I'm gonna read this so that I get it right.
• 42:31
  Crista Cowan: You say, document your history, make time for it, write it down, record it, leave them something more than an empty plate.
• 42:40
  Crista Cowan: Have you started that process for yourself?
• 42:43
  Rosie Grant: Definitely so.
• 42:44
  Rosie Grant: I would say that like um one of the like sadder comments and messages that I get is people saying things like, Oh, I like my mom died and I never got her recipe because like it was awkward to ask for it, or I just you know, thought I had more time and now that's lost and I haven't been able to recreate it.
• 43:04
  Rosie Grant: And um, I mean, I've gotten so many messages like that over the years of people being like, oh my gosh, I like, or my family didn't really use recipes, but my mom would make this thing by memory, and I wish I had recorded it, documented it, something like that.
• 43:18
  Rosie Grant: So I think in my own family, um, like my dad makes a really good jambalaya.
• 43:23
  Rosie Grant: So I've started recording him doing that more often.
• 43:27
  Rosie Grant: I made a family cookbook, um, which was an excuse for my cousin's wedding, but it was also a way to document our recipes and share them amongst everyone.
• 43:36
  Rosie Grant: Um, my great-grandmother, who had moved from Ireland, she had an Irish soda bread recipe and a gingerbread recipe.
• 43:44
  Rosie Grant: So I was able to get copies of it and transcribed it and so sent that out to everyone.
• 43:50
  Rosie Grant: So it's not only documenting it, but making sure everyone has access.
• 43:53
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 43:54
  Rosie Grant: So yeah, a big part of the project was like, you know, you can start level zero can just be like ask a few questions and record it.
• 44:00
  Rosie Grant: You know, level two might be like, you know, videotaping you doing a cooking session and write down the recipe and then of course sharing that around.
• 44:09
  Rosie Grant: Um, because if we don't do it, then it's it's easy for these things to get lost.
• 44:14
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, well said so much.
• 44:16
  Crista Cowan: Well, before I ask you the final question, um, how can people find you, follow you, buy your cookbook?
• 44:24
  Rosie Grant: Um, thank you so much.
• 44:25
  Rosie Grant: Again, I'm still like, oh my gosh, this is a good book.
• 44:28
  Rosie Grant: Um one day we'll stop feeling excited, like this rash feeling.
• 44:33
  Rosie Grant: Um, they can follow me on TikTok and Instagram at GhostlyArchive.
• 44:37
  Rosie Grant: Um, I have a ghostlyarchive.com website if folks are interested.
• 44:42
  Rosie Grant: Um but really social media is the main area.
• 44:44
  Rosie Grant: And then of course, if you just Google to die for a cookbook of gravestone recipes, um, HarperCollins and really all major booksellers will have it.
• 44:53
  Rosie Grant: Um, if people come across cemeteries, food or not food that they think are interesting, I love getting messages like that from folks.
• 45:01
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 45:02
  Crista Cowan: Well, my final question for you you've done all this work, you've kind of made it your life's work, it sounds like.
• 45:08
  Crista Cowan: Have you considered whether or not you want a recipe on your gravestone?
• 45:12
  Rosie Grant: I have.
• 45:13
  Rosie Grant: I feel like I have to at this point.
• 45:15
  Rosie Grant: Um, so I'm currently working with Congressional Cemetery where I did my internship to buy a plot there.
• 45:22
  Rosie Grant: Well, I don't know what the stone will look like yet, because um kudos to the folks who have figured out how to um format it.
• 45:31
  Rosie Grant: Like, you know, a gravestone only has so much space um to fit a full recipe.
• 45:36
  Rosie Grant: So I want to do, I think for me right now, I want to do a clam linguini or clam pasta.
• 45:42
  Rosie Grant: Um, I love clam-based dishes.
• 45:44
  Rosie Grant: I'm very nostalgic to those.
• 45:45
  Rosie Grant: My partner's from Maine, and so I love any like seafood y type dishes.
• 45:50
  Rosie Grant: And as we've been creating sort of our own um community in Los Angeles, neither of us are like born and raised here.
• 45:57
  Rosie Grant: And so having these like regular dinners with folks, I love making this dish.
• 46:02
  Rosie Grant: And it's just very delicious with white wine and butter and clams, of course.
• 46:07
  Rosie Grant: So that's currently what I have picked.
• 46:10
  Crista Cowan: Well, there you go.
• 46:11
  Crista Cowan: Well, I just uh my parents and siblings and I just bought um cemetery plots actually this last week.
• 46:18
  Crista Cowan: Congratulations.
• 46:19
  Crista Cowan: You know, that's awesome.
• 46:21
  Crista Cowan: Um, but now that I have read through your book and had this conversation with you, I'm gonna have to maybe spend a minute thinking about which recipe I would put on my tombstone.
• 46:30
  Crista Cowan: I love that so much and congratulations.
• 46:33
  Rosie Grant: That's very exciting.
• 46:34
  Crista Cowan: It is kind of one of those things we need to just be more comfortable talking about.
• 46:39
  Rosie Grant: Yep, exactly.
• 46:40
  Rosie Grant: And it gets hopefully a little easier every time.
• 46:44
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it does.
• 46:44
  Crista Cowan: Rosie, thank you so much.
• 46:46
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for the work that you do.
• 46:47
  Crista Cowan: I think it's so valuable, so important to put it out into the world.
• 46:51
  Crista Cowan: And of course, thank you for coming on the podcast.
• 46:53
  Crista Cowan: And I loved getting to know you better.
• 46:55
  Rosie Grant: Same here.
• 46:56
  Rosie Grant: What an honor.
• 46:57
  Rosie Grant: Thank you so much.
• 46:58
  Rosie Grant: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.