Family recipes etched in stone. Gravestone, that is....
Recipes on gravestones are a relatively new phenomenon in the long history of cemetery iconography A German Christmas cookie recipe on the grave of Maxine Kathleen Poppe Menster, in Cascade, Iowa (Rachel Mummey) At his home in Washington, D.C., Charlie McBride often bakes his mother’s recipe for peach cobbler. As he pours the topping over the fruit , he remembers how his mother, aunts and grandmother sat under a tree in Louisiana, cackling at one another’s stories as they peeled peaches to can for the winter . McBride loved this family recipe so much that when his mother, O’Neal Bogan Watson, died in 2005, he had it etched on her gravestone in New Ebenezer Cemetery in Castor, Louisiana, a town of about 230 people. His mother’s instructions were simple: Bake the cobbler at 350 degrees “until done.” “It really is just a great recipe,” said McBride, 78, a public policy consultant. In cemeteries from Alaska to Israel, families have memorialized their loved ones...