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.