What will people leave at your grave after you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil and gone gently into that good night? I only raise this cheery question because I recently saw a photograph of Antoine-Augustin Parmentier’s grave. The French pharmacist was a champion of the humble spud and dedicated his life to encouraging people to eat the tuber. In the 1700s, French people believed potatoes were only fit for animals, but Parmentier changed their minds with a series of cunning marketing devices. He organised potato-centric dinner parties where every course contained potatoes, and presented potato blossoms to the king and queen. And that is why, more than two centuries after his death, people are still bringing potatoes to his grave in Paris.
It’s a similar story with the grave of King Frederick the Great, in Potsdam. He is remembered as the potato king for his work in popularising potatoes in Prussia, which is where Parmentier first ate them when he was a prisoner of war.
There are no spuds to be seen at Glasnevin Cemetery unless you nip into the Gravediggers pub next door for a warming bowl of coddle. That pub, at the gates of the cemetery, must lose a few pint glasses every year when people come to toast Brendan Behan at his grave. Not one, but two pints of Guinness sat on his grave in February to mark his 100th birthday.
Behan wasn’t the greatest fan of the British empire, to put it mildly, but he did have something in common with Queen Elizabeth II – a weakness for marmalade. In fact, the young IRA volunteer had just finished his bread and marmalade in Dublin one morning in 1942 when he was arrested and jailed, following a gun attack on two detectives.
Prince of the church – Brian Maye on Cardinal Michael Logue
Conflict of many colours – Frank McNally on a finely illustrated atlas of the Civil War
Lunar quest – Frank McNally on moon missions, misinformed quiz questions, and mountweazels
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
The late queen will forever be associated with marmalade, following her star turn in a comic sketch with Paddington Bear, made as part of her Platinum Jubilee celebrations. She confided in Paddington that she too had a penchant for the preserve and always kept a marmalade sandwich in her handbag for emergencies. When she died, the Royal Parks service was forced to ask people to stop leaving industrial quantities of marmalade sandwiches outside Buckingham Palace. They were worried about the effect of the sandwiches on the wildlife.
The wildlife near Roald Dahl’s grave in Buckinghamshire certainly get their daily quota of fruit and vegetables from fans of the children’s writer. It’s no surprise that the author of James and the Giant Peach gets peaches, but visitors also leave onions, in a nod to his obsession with cultivating enormous onions. He even had a string of onions carved into a garden bench at his home.
So, with a bit of judicious planning, you could happily eat your way around some cemeteries but did you know that you could also bake your way around them? Yes, while some bakers vow they’ll take their acclaimed recipes to their graves, their relatives take it literally and etch the recipes on the headstones.
Los Angeles-based archivist Rosie Grant brought this to public attention when she found a recipe for spritz cookies – a type of buttery biscuit – on a grave in a Brooklyn cemetery. She made a TikTok of her effort to recreate it and people began telling her about more gravestone recipes. On @ghostlyarchive, you can watch her baking fudge from a grave in Utah, carrot cake from California and nut rolls from Israel. And when she can, she films herself at the grave with the finished product. In one, she is eating apricot ice-cream in a Maine cemetery. Another video shows her with a peach cobbler at a grave in Louisiana. All recipes to die for, I’m sure.
If there was ever a grave in need of a recipe, it would be that of Joe Sheridan, the man who gifted Irish Coffee to the world when he tried to warm up some stranded passengers at Foynes airport in 1943.
Joe Sheridan is buried in Oakland, California and, while a stone on his grave tells how he “created for the world the treasure known as Irish Coffee”, there is no recipe. Undaunted, Rosie Grant found his Irish Coffee recipe and set about making it. However, her method will strike horror into those who appreciate a perfectly constructed Irish Coffee with clearly distinct layers of cream and coffee. She substituted frothed milk for the cream and merrily splashed onto the coffee, getting a beigy-coloured drink for her troubles,
Undeterred, she happily knocked it back. Fortunately, she did not take this concoction to the cemetery. Had she done so, Joe Sheridan would almost certainly have been spinning in his grave.