The Family Recipes That Live On in Cemeteries

On a clear day at Nome City Cemetery (AK), you can watch planes take off over the Bering Sea. Within the field of white graves, you might also see a small black obelisk that shines brilliantly when it catches the sun. Getting closer, you’ll note an unmistakable symbol engraved near its base. It’s not a cross, nor a Star of David, but a sacred container of sorts in many American households: a tub of Cool Whip.

The grave belongs to Bonnie Johnson, a mother, former flight attendant, and creator of a cookie recipe whose batches always arrived at birthdays, holidays, and school events housed inside empty Cool Whip containers. Anyone looking to make Johnson’s classic no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies is in luck. Her recipe is also etched into her gravestone.

Johnson’s memorial is not the only one of its kind. There are at least 18 graves around the world inscribed with a cherished family recipe. In Seattle, Washington, a grandmother’s blueberry pie is immortalized on the side of a black bench. On an Israeli kibbutz, a father and professional baker’s famous yeast roll recipe is etched in Hebrew on white stone. In Upstate New York, a mother’s handwritten instructions on cooking chicken soup are carved into pink granite. The graves stretch across religions, borders, and decades. But they all honor the love and memories behind every batch of bread, cobbler, cheese dip, and more.

A grave is a story told in symbols and shorthand. Some of these messages are straightforward. A death year shared among many cemetery residents might point to a historic epidemic or local disaster. A fraternal order symbol is easily decoded from memory or with a Google search. Messages coded in Cool Whip, two teaspoons of vanilla, and a few cups of oats, however, might be more difficult to discern.

But recipes do tell stories. In her essay, “Claiming a Piece of the Pie: How the Language of Recipes Defines Community,” linguist Colleen Cotter writes that “a recipe can be viewed as a story, a cultural narrative that can be shared and has been constructed by members of a community.” She reflects on her grandmother’s ability to “read a cookbook like a novel” because it “carried elements that fired her imagination, that drew her in, that caused her to reflect on her own behavior (as a cook), and to construct her her identity … in terms that were readily accessible to her and in relation to her peers.”

Can you read a recipe grave like a novel? If so, it’s only fitting to start with the ingredients.

Sugar. Milk. Cocoa. Margarine. Oats. Peanut butter. Vanilla.

In 1957, Bonnie Johnson packed her belongings in a station wagon and drove from Washington State to the territory of Alaska. There, she took a job as a flight attendant, married, saw Alaska become a U.S. state, started working for the Department of Revenue and the DMV, and had four children.

Living on the frontier had its charms: She loved flying around the territory in Cordova Airlines’ DC-3s and even got to see President Dwight Eisenhower attend the parade celebrating Alaska’s gaining statehood in 1959. But there were also drawbacks: Grocery shopping, for instance, was now an errand that needed the precise logistics of a military operation.

“When we were kids, the barge or steamship came and you had most of your bulk groceries in there,” her son, Doug Johnson, remembers. “You go to the store for your daily stuff, but things that cost a lot of money, you had to stockpile.” Since barges typically didn’t come during the winter, families had to stretch those stockpiles across several months.

Johnson’s cookie recipe is a snapshot of a mother making the most of this constrained pantry: Other than milk, all of its ingredients could be stored for months. The no-bake recipe was also perfect for whipping up a batch at a moment’s notice: “She had three boys who ate her out of house and home,” Doug laughs. “I remember from the second grade on, she was making cookies for school projects, birthdays, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving—whatever the occasion was, she’d bring them.”

“She lived through so many times where saving things was really important,” Doug’s wife, Robin, adds. This no-waste approach not only applied to her cooking, but her signature serving dish. When Robin and Doug moved her out of her longtime home toward the end of her life, they found stacks of empty Cool Whip containers.

After Bonnie died in 2007, her children erected an obelisk with different pieces of her life story carved into each side: a poem by her granddaughter, a plane to denote her high-flying years, a five-pointed star (to represent her years as “grand poobah at the [local] Order of the Eastern Star,” Doug says), a Cool Whip tub, and her cookie recipe. They often gather around the monument, scatter at its feet new pieces of beach glass they’ve gathered along the shore, and remember a mother who made the most of what she had.

Even though access to fresh groceries has improved in Nome, Doug and Robin still swear by Bonnie’s cookies. “She must have customized the recipe because it’s not like any other no-bake cookie I’ve ever had,” Robin says. “They’re really good.”

It’s easy to dismiss a recipe grave as mere novelty. But memorials celebrating an individual’s culinary achievements are not a new development. The most notable of these might be the tomb of Eurysaces , a Roman baker who built a memorial for himself sometime between 50 and 20 BC. The grand structure’s frieze offers a remarkable glimpse into the ancient art of breadmaking, featuring figures grinding grain, kneading dough, and baking loaves in domed ovens. If the detailed design wasn’t enough to demonstrate Eurysaces’s success, the inscription brags, “This is the monument of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces, baker, contractor, it’s obvious!”

Such historic tributes tend to focus on the public, professional accomplishments of men. But modern recipe graves, which start appearing around the 1990s, largely celebrate the achievements of women within a family.

In the United States, where most recipe graves are located, the epitaphs are part of a progression toward showcasing personal identities and interests in headstone designs. Keith Eggener, an art and architecture professor at the University of Oregon and author of Cemeteries, notes that this is a marked shift from the American custom of linking the deceased to a larger group, such as a fraternal order or religion, on headstones from the 18th through early 20th centuries.

“In these earlier stones, you’re showing not so much your individual identity, but your membership in a broader community of worthy citizens,” Eggener says. As membership in organized religions and fraternal orders have declined, however, new depictions of worth have emerged.

“A grave shows what is important to you,” says Candi Cann, a religious studies professor at Baylor University who writes about the intersection of food and death traditions. According to Cann, recipes have come to serve as shorthand for love and nurturing. “If a recipe is a symbol of who you are, that means that you cared about having people over and feeding them and taking care of them.” In fact, Cann opens the anthology she edited, Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife, with a dedication to her late mother: “My recipe box is a shrine to you and to your memory.”

Recipe gravestones also show a change in how women are memorialized. “You think about so many women when they were buried, [their gravestones] would just be like ‘Mrs. John Smith,’ and her name would be erased,” adds Cann. “But with a recipe epitaph, “she’s immortalized through the food. That’s one place where her name matters.”

In Rehovot, Israel, Ida Kleinman’s name will live on through her nut rolls. When visiting her grave, which bears the sweet recipe, her son, Yossi Kleinman, likes to hover nearby. Sometimes, a passerby might take note of the inscription and grin. Another might even take out a sheet of paper and write it down.

“This is what we wanted it to be,” he says. “People walk by and smile a little.”

Yossi designed the grave himself, working with a stonecutter to execute his vision: a flat-topped, rectangular tombstone etched in Hebrew with his parents’ biographical information on top and his mother’s nut roll recipe on its front. He and his sister decided that the recipe was the perfect tribute to their mother, who always provided comfort. When Ida and Isaiah Kleinman emigrated to Israel in the late 1940s, they didn’t have much. Ida had escaped poverty in Romania, while Isaiah was a Polish Holocaust survivor who had endured nine separate concentration camps. But they built a new life in Rehovot, elevating their modest means with love and care.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.