Transcript
Speaker: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper herself and on today's episode we are talking two of my favorite things funerals and food.
Speaker: Let's get into it.
Speaker: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney aka the Glam Reaper herself.
Speaker: On today's episode I'm very excited because we are talking my two favourite loves, food and funerals.
Speaker: Yay!
Speaker: Although today is probably a tough day which we'll get into because I'm actually detoxing.
Speaker: But anyway, so please Rosie welcome and introduce yourself to the audience.
Speaker: Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker: Yes, I'm Rosie Grant and food and funerals.
Speaker: I'm going to use that.
Speaker: I love that phrasing.
Speaker: But yeah, food and death talk are like my two combined loves.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Now you have done so well.
Speaker: So it's funny that during COVID when we all had sort of all this time to ourselves, it's so funny because I'm big into sort of, I don't want to say life coaching, but I'm big into sort of improving myself.
Speaker: I love manifesting.
Speaker: I love vision boards.
Speaker: I'm looking at them right behind the camera here.
Speaker: Like I'm big into anything Feng Shui, although I'm always getting that wrong.
Speaker: I think it's Feng Shui.
Speaker: I'm terrible.
Speaker: And my friend who I interviewed on the podcast at the very beginning, she'll probably shoot me.
Speaker: But anyway.
Speaker: And I'm into all of these things.
Speaker: Like it's all about bettering ourselves, just really positive and just putting that positive energy out into the world.
Speaker: And one of the things that it was like, you know, to get your purpose in life or to be fulfilling your life's whatever purpose that you really should focus on things you love.
Speaker: And so I sat down and I was like, okay, but I'm in the funeral business.
Speaker: Do I love this?
Speaker: Like, do I really love this?
Speaker: And so I really started trying to hone down in everything I do.
Speaker: And I realized like, I love food.
Speaker: You know, COVID was we were all kind of stuck indoors and stuff like that.
Speaker: So, you know, I would like find myself cooking and baking.
Speaker: And those are my two things that I choose to relax and working in the space I work in.
Speaker: I'm not a funeral director.
Speaker: And so I don't know, you know, they have an even tougher job.
Speaker: I could never embalm or anything like that.
Speaker: But that's how I decompress and how I de-stress is cooking and baking and food.
Speaker: And so I thought to myself, I was like, huh, I wonder, like, should I start like doing some cooking and doing some of my things and bring it into what I do?
Speaker: And I guess I do it in a certain way because most of the memorials that I organize do have catered reception and stuff.
Speaker: So I guess I have my two loves in that sense.
Speaker: But I did actually film myself recording or film myself recording, film myself cooking.
Speaker: And I think one of the funniest videos, even when I look back, I'm like, oh, my God, what was when I was when I was doing Thanksgiving dinner.
Speaker: And it was my first time stuffing a turkey.
Speaker: Well, it's actually a hysterical video because like I never knew giblets existed before I found them.
Speaker: Anyway, I'm digressing.
Speaker: I'm talking about me.
Speaker: Oh, I'm obsessed with this now.
Speaker: It was very, it's very, even I look back on the video and I'm crying with laughter.
Speaker: It's like my facial expressions.
Speaker: Oh my God, what is this?
Speaker: Anyway, Rosie, how did you get into this?
Speaker: So to give everyone context and forgive me if I forget something or mislead anybody.
Speaker: So Rosie effectively has an incredible social media following because you create or recreate the recipes from gravestones.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I never even knew recipes were on gravestones.
Speaker: This is genius.
Speaker: And I think it started just out of curiosity for you, right?
Speaker: So tell us, talk us through the journey.
Speaker: How did you get here?
Speaker: Weirdly, it started out of a homework assignment, even stranger.
Speaker: That's a homework assignment ever.
Speaker: I mean, similar kind of to what you were talking about of the pandemic hit, and I just had started a library science master's degree at the University of Maryland.
Speaker: And so my vision board right the year beforehand had been like, I've always wanted to become a librarian.
Speaker: And so I was in library school.
Speaker: It was completely virtual just because of the pandemic.
Speaker: The program would have been flexible anyways.
Speaker: And I was at the same time interning at a cemetery, a congressional in DC.
Speaker: And I was taking this library class that was all about networks and algorithms, basically how to like go viral on like TikTok and Instagram.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: I didn't know what to make my account about.
Speaker: And my professor was like, well, you're interning at a cemetery, make your, just go into like cemetery TikTok or grave talk.
Speaker: And so I was like, I don't think there's an audience for that.
Speaker: And so that's why I was even posting about cemeteries to begin with.
Speaker: And then of course, flash forward to
Speaker: this first gravestone.
Speaker: And so after a while, I was first posting just about our own cemetery and like people who had died and were buried and unusual stories that we heard about them.
Speaker: And then that opened the world to just learning about different gravestones in general and memorials.
Speaker: And I heard about this grave in Brooklyn, New York.
Speaker: That's the grave of Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson.
Speaker: And she has a spritz cookie.
Speaker: It's like an open cookbook.
Speaker: It's the most beautiful gravestone.
Speaker: Like it looks like you just like go on this like beautiful grassy field and her like book gravestone is open.
Speaker: It has her spritz cookie recipe.
Speaker: And just like you were saying of all the people learning how to cook during the pandemic, this was me too.
Speaker: I cooked it extremely inaccurately, but I posted it and then the rest is kind of history.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And where is it in Brooklyn?
Speaker: Is it in Greenwood?
Speaker: It's in Greenwood.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: It's like right in the middle.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'll have to go and investigate.
Speaker: I've been to Greenwood so many times, but now I'm going to have to investigate this.
Speaker: And you had heard about this recipe.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I said it came up here from DC.
Speaker: Exactly that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like Atlas Obscura, which is like the best website for like learn.
Speaker: Whenever I'm bored, I'm like, I'll go into Atlas.
Speaker: And I think a lot of cemetery TikTokers and like cemetery content creators, we very heavily rely on Atlas Obscura just because like it has everything.
Speaker: It's like unusual stories.
Speaker: It's all mapped out.
Speaker: And so I had heard about this gravestone from Atlas and
Speaker: And there's actually several other gravestones as well, also featured on Atlas Obscura.
Speaker: That's great for cemetery content.
Speaker: And then when I was Googling Naomi, just to learn more who she was, through just Google searches, other ones popped up.
Speaker: Some had made local news, some were in different blog posts, some were on Twitter.
Speaker: And I just started collecting them.
Speaker: And I did like data mapping in classes.
Speaker: So I just made a big map where all of them were and started clicking through all of them.
Speaker: Oh my God, that's amazing.
Speaker: Because I mean, that was going to be one of my questions was where do you get your content?
Speaker: Like how, I mean, how do you find these recipes?
Speaker: So clearly you just troll the internet and figure out.
Speaker: Now, can I ask though,
Speaker: I guess there could be recipes out there on gravestones, but it has to be documented by somebody and isn't online.
Speaker: So therefore you don't know about it, I guess.
Speaker: Oh, there's plenty.
Speaker: I mean, the first, I would say in the beginning, I found about nine just through Google searches and social media.
Speaker: And like, there was even one, there's one in California that I found it because someone misspelled recipe.
Speaker: And I was looking through all these different hashtags and
Speaker: And I accidentally misspelled recipe myself.
Speaker: So I was like, oh, there's already someone who posted to this.
Speaker: And it was a gravestone recipe in California.
Speaker: So I was like, oh, my gosh, like that's the chances of that are crazy.
Speaker: And that's so funny, though, because I often think that sometimes I misspell something when I'm doing a hashtag on something.
Speaker: And I'm like, you know what?
Speaker: I bet you I'm not the only person who's done that.
Speaker: So it has a weird it comes into favor at some time.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, so that was the first nine of them.
Speaker: I'm now up to almost 20.
Speaker: And the rest have come.
Speaker: I mean, I'm very lucky that it's gotten some traction and some press and media, which I'm very grateful for.
Speaker: Partially because now families have started reaching out being like, my mom's buried here.
Speaker: Here's a photo of her recipe.
Speaker: We would love for you to cook it.
Speaker: here's my aunt's grave, or even there's a woman who's still alive in Arkansas.
Speaker: And I talked to her the other day, and she has a cookie recipe.
Speaker: And so we got to actually chit chat about
Speaker: how she put together her gravestone for whenever she passes.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So, I mean, it's kind of become this little thing.
Speaker: Now, is it a case of, you know, you're just riding the wave and you're enjoying sort of, I don't want to say the attention, but you're enjoying, you know, all that it's bringing.
Speaker: Do you want to stick with librarianism or working in a cemetery?
Speaker: Or has this now brought sort of where you're like, hmm, maybe this is a thing?
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: Partially just, I think the last year, I mean, this account got started again out of homework and the community that's come out of it has been amazing.
Speaker: I can't say it's been the most unusual of topics.
Speaker: My parents are both ghost tour guides in Virginia.
Speaker: Like my dad loves history.
Speaker: I had interned at a cemetery just because I was really interested in cemeteries in general.
Speaker: Like
Speaker: So my program was library science, but it's library science and archives.
Speaker: I think cemeteries have the coolest archives, whether for genealogy or just local history.
Speaker: And food as well.
Speaker: I was a creative writing minor in college and I studied food writing.
Speaker: And I just feel like kind of what you were saying beforehand, food connects to so many different things.
Speaker: I've met a lot of really interesting people from this.
Speaker: So I would definitely say last year was just trying to keep my head above water of just the explosion that happened that was very unexpected.
Speaker: And I think this coming year, my focus is more of like getting to know who these people were.
Speaker: I'd like to visit all of the graves.
Speaker: Ideally, if I could visit all of them next year, it'd be great.
Speaker: And then maybe even meet the families and see who are these people.
Speaker: How do I actually cook them?
Speaker: Things like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's really beautiful, actually.
Speaker: Somebody should do that with you.
Speaker: That's really beautiful because, no, that's something, you know, it's like what I do with the memorials and stuff.
Speaker: That's just so wholesome.
Speaker: It's like, that's what it's about.
Speaker: It's about, you know, okay, it's gone viral and it's amazing and stuff, but at the end of the day, there's a person behind that tombstone.
Speaker: There's a family that are missing that person for, you know, maybe centuries ago.
Speaker: You know, I don't know how old some of these tombstones are, but
Speaker: like there is a family behind that.
Speaker: And so, I mean, yeah, visiting the gravestones will be amazing, but exactly that, like meeting the family and maybe has the cookie recipe gotten lost, you know, maybe, you know, they're not using it anymore.
Speaker: I mean, I definitely have my, my mom is still alive.
Speaker: And even though I joke because of what I do, whenever I'm talking on media, I feel like I kill my parents all the time.
Speaker: Well, my mum is still alive.
Speaker: I was just texting her just there a few minutes ago.
Speaker: But she has recipes that I think are kind of iconic and stuff like that, you know?
Speaker: But they go on a tombstone.
Speaker: I mean, I doubt it because I don't think burial is kind of for us as such anymore.
Speaker: And that's the thing as well, which is beautiful about your project and what you're doing is burial is almost becoming something in the past.
Speaker: It's kind of history in and of itself.
Speaker: Like between...
Speaker: you know, and again, this is funeral stuff that I don't know if you're, I'm sure you probably are aware of, but between, you know, alkaline hydrolysis and the human composting and all these new things.
Speaker: And obviously cremation is just growing and growing and we're running out of space.
Speaker: Burial in and of itself is becoming, and a tombstone, like a gravestone is almost,
Speaker: artifacts at this stage.
Speaker: Yeah, completely so.
Speaker: And it's expensive to die too.
Speaker: It's expensive.
Speaker: Both of my grandmothers passed away during the pandemic.
Speaker: And at first we were like, I mean, neither of them had particular recipes that we might've considered, but you know, just the stone, the plot and everything like this isn't these, all of these mostly women, all of these women have, um, they very much committed to a thing that not everyone is going to casually do.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: Like, even, I didn't even think of that, actually.
Speaker: Even if mum, you know, again, here I am killing her off again.
Speaker: I do this all the time.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Even if, you know, we did bury her back in Ireland, which would be expensive, and then got a gravestone.
Speaker: Like, I'm not sure actually about it here.
Speaker: I mean, I should actually know that, but I'm not sure about it here.
Speaker: At home, as far as I can remember, from when I wrote a book about it, it was each letter, like, you know, or word...
Speaker: is a price there's a price to because somebody has to obviously engrave it on this thing i don't think it's kind of a whatever you want i can't imagine it's like that over here i think it's pretty much like the new york times it's per letter or word um so yeah if it's a lengthy recipe it starts to get a bit ridiculous definitely committing to i mean some of these there's this one grave in um in israel and it's like all of the and it's in hebrew too so it's very like detailed carved out it takes up it's like this gigantic
Speaker: rectangular like pillar almost.
Speaker: And I'm like, that must have been very expensive to do.
Speaker: But it's beautiful.
Speaker: It's like, it's such a, they definitely, there was a sacrifice to it.
Speaker: But now they have this gorgeously designed gravestone for the family to remember the person.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Oh, it's a beautiful, it is definitely a beautiful thing.
Speaker: It's, as I said, it's just kind of, it's become almost artefact.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In a sense, I mean, I haven't, I did visit my grandparents, my, yeah, my grandparents on my dad's side grave when I was at home, just because I hadn't actually seen the grave before.
Speaker: in a couple of years but um my grandparents on my mother's side they died so long ago that you know we never go to that grave and so it is it's kind of it's always fascinated me um cemeteries like that um you know as i said i'm not a funeral director um and so i very much i'm on somewhat on the outside but um i've always been fascinated with sort of cemeteries and epitaphs and you know
Speaker: I remember having this concept for a film, not film, a series where, you know, you went, this person was magic or whatever, it was, you know, one of these where they would go into a gravestone.
Speaker: So they would jump into a gravestone and become that person.
Speaker: They would live in that person's life.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: Not superpower.
Speaker: It was just sort of a, I mean, still potentially could be something.
Speaker: That's so cool.
Speaker: That I have...
Speaker: You should pitch that to someone because that sounds like an amazing show.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Because every episode is a different episode, effectively.
Speaker: You've gone into a different life.
Speaker: I mean, it's kind of along the lines of the time traveler's wife, I guess.
Speaker: Honestly, yeah.
Speaker: That's so cool.
Speaker: It is fun to like someone else, someone at Congressional and they may be recording someone else's event.
Speaker: called cemeteries, like open-ear museums.
Speaker: And it's very fun to like walk down and like see two different graves, particularly if they're like well-known graves and you're like, they didn't know each other in life.
Speaker: And the fact that they're now neighbors basically in death, like, like we have, um,
Speaker: a former Edgar Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover is buried there with all of these people who hated his guts and they're all neighbors together.
Speaker: And I'm like, this is so spicy that they're all right next to each other.
Speaker: Totally.
Speaker: I'm actually envisioning, because I know they did it a couple of times, I think it was around Halloween, the episodes of The Simpsons where their ghosts kind of come up.
Speaker: Oh my God.
Speaker: I think they did it in some other, did they do it as part of Soul, the Pixar movie Soul as well, they kind of did similar.
Speaker: But I'm just I'm envisioning Simpsons for some reason, the Simpsons where they all come out of their graves.
Speaker: I can picture that.
Speaker: And honestly, even like what you were talking about of like a story of going into it kind of feels like soul of like people going into each other's bodies.
Speaker: And like, I don't know, that's so that's very cool.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: Well, again, it kind of comes down to and I'm sure you're similar walking through cemeteries and like.
Speaker: I'm sure you've had the same experience where you've looked at a grave and you're like, oh, my God, five years.
Speaker: They only had five.
Speaker: Like they only survived five years.
Speaker: What was their life like?
Speaker: What was you know, who were their parents like?
Speaker: What did they die of?
Speaker: And there is a bit of a morbid curiosity.
Speaker: And I know like nowadays when somebody dies, you know, and I know there's a couple of schools of thought on this and that it's it is not anybody's business what somebody dies of.
Speaker: And I know in funerals, you know, there's always especially it's a very Irish thing, you know,
Speaker: oh gosh and what happened you know for sure yeah but it's almost a human compulsion like a morbid curiosity I don't I feel like there's no ill will behind it it's just you want to know and I don't even know why you want to know but you're just like was it tragic it's always tragic especially but like was it an accident and I don't honestly I don't know why that flavours you know what's going I guess it's just
Speaker: curiosity imagination and stuff but oh absolutely yeah i mean it is interesting to i mean most of these people all pull information from their obituaries very few of them maybe two of them of like 20 say how they died and yeah if your mind you're always curious and that's a question that i'll often get like
Speaker: when people are asking about the gravestones is like, how did they die?
Speaker: And nine times out of 10, I don't know.
Speaker: Like these graves are a little bit older.
Speaker: I mean, not like the actual age of them is not very old.
Speaker: The oldest one's from 1994.
Speaker: But you know, the people were in their sixties and seventies and eighties.
Speaker: There were no like children, if that makes sense.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I can't imagine too many children would have too many recipes.
Speaker: It's just really good mac and cheese recipes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Blue box.
Speaker: One's cookie dough.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, hey.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and that's honestly, in some ways, that's probably what makes what you do sort of heartwarming as well, because I guess you're not you're you're not dealing with.
Speaker: infants or children or teenagers or people who didn't get to live their life and I'm not saying at 60 you've lived your life but somebody who's at least had good innings who's lived somewhat to create a recipe so because I think if you were kind of trying to
Speaker: you know, if whatever you were doing.
Speaker: I mean, I know we had a lady on the show here who's also TikTok famous for her grave cleaning and she's amazing.
Speaker: She's so, so, so.
Speaker: Either Manic Pixie Dream Mom, Lady Tafos.
Speaker: There's a handful.
Speaker: Oh my gosh, I'm obsessed with her stuff.
Speaker: She's so cool.
Speaker: And you know what, she's so lovely and she goes, she's gone through a lot herself personally and it just makes what she does so much more amazing, I guess.
Speaker: But like that, you know, she's cleaning graves.
Speaker: So I guess she's, hers can be of any age and, you know, it's, it's, yeah, it's definitely harder.
Speaker: But, but so what's the plans?
Speaker: What's the future?
Speaker: What are we, what are we thinking?
Speaker: What's, what's next?
Speaker: What's next?
Speaker: Well, so I'm hoping to fly to San Francisco either this or next month.
Speaker: and go to this snickerdoodle cookie.
Speaker: So this was the one that I first heard about because of the hashtag that both of them spelled.
Speaker: The daughter, excuse me, the granddaughter of this woman reached out on TikTok.
Speaker: And so I'm hoping to actually cook the recipe with her family.
Speaker: And then for the rest of this year, too, I think I'm trying to plan like different mini trips that I can to just experience this.
Speaker: Back in the fall, I met Naomi.
Speaker: So the spritz cookie in Brooklyn, I met the family of that woman.
Speaker: And we cooked her spritz cookie together.
Speaker: And it was so cool.
Speaker: They were lovely.
Speaker: They still have her cookie press that like she used to make these famous cookies.
Speaker: And it was incredible just hearing them tell stories about her.
Speaker: And so I personally would love as many of these people as possible.
Speaker: And a lot of these people, again, they're not very old graves.
Speaker: So it's like their grandkids are on TikTok or their kids are on TikTok and have reached out or they're on Instagram.
Speaker: So this whole little like food community has started forming.
Speaker: So I'd like love to like
Speaker: almost take that offline on some sense.
Speaker: I'd like to meet some of these people in person.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Well, it's definitely, I feel like social media and all that, it's a great starting point, but like that meeting people offline is definitely, it's so much more rewarding as well, you know, because you can actually form, I feel like you form a real bond then or something, whereas online it's like, you know.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: You can only say so much and especially kind of like what you were even talking about of like, at the end of the day, like it's, we're talking because someone has passed away and, you know, there's memories and there's weird feelings and it's,
Speaker: I think for my own understanding of this whole industry, and like I was not familiar with the death positive movement.
Speaker: I wasn't familiar with the idea of like memorializing people and like thinking about celebration of life and of course leading to death.
Speaker: And so I don't know, I'm trying to keep that at the back of my mind while having these like conversations, because it's a little scary.
Speaker: Like we're talking about something that to me is very terrifying and I'm trying to grapple with that.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: So that's hopefully going to be this next coming year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we support you and can't wait to watch, see the next recipes.
Speaker: And maybe I'm going to try some, when I'm not on this stupid detox, I will, maybe I'll try and copy some of your recipes and see how I get on.
Speaker: I'm sure there's, I must actually keep an eye out.
Speaker: I'm sure there's some recipes on some Irish gravestones.
Speaker: Oh, I would imagine so.
Speaker: There's so much like, and the fact that there's two in Israel, because at first I was like, oh, it's just maybe a US thing, but I could definitely see there being different places around
Speaker: and everyone has many pretty cemeteries yeah definitely well I will keep my eyeballs out when I'm in Ireland I'm in New York right now but when I'm in Ireland I'll definitely keep my eyes out and I'll let you know if there's any rest of you thank you so much appreciate it no worries thank you so much for coming on the Glamour River podcast Rosie
Speaker: So that was another episode from the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: Let us know what you think.
Speaker: Would you like Rosie to come and maybe visit?
Speaker: Is there a gravestone near you that has an interesting recipe on it?
Speaker: We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker: Glamreaperpodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: We'll talk to you soon.
