Guest Episode: Graveyard Cookies and Dollhouse Crimes

Hello, hello, and also hello.

We're back in your earbuds again, Weeping Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley, and I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And this episode, we have a delicious sampling of episodes from a podcast we think you'll really enjoy, Atlas Obscura.

Their podcast is a daily celebration of the world's strange and wondrous places, and the episodes are more like snack length, and so we have two of them here for you today.

As a little bouche, we're starting with a cookie.

Yes, eat dessert first.

Life is extremely uncertain these days.

This is an adorable story that combines graveyards and Scandinavian Christmas cookies, which is not a sentence you normally get to say.

Go ahead and enjoy as much as we did and then we'll pop back in to introduce you to the other super fascinating episode we have for you.

Which just happens to be about one of my favorite things in the world.

And after you've enjoyed, don't forget to subscribe to the Atlas Atlas Obscura podcast so you don't miss out on any more of their weird and wonderful stories, like a visit to the world's only museum dedicated to microbes.

Go ahead and drink.

As well as the world's loneliest tree and the largest organism on the planet.

But first, cookies.

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Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

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About five years ago, Atlas Obscura released its first ever book.

It was also called Atlas Obscura.

And we are just about to release our next big book into the world.

And this one is called Gastro Obscura, a food adventurer's guide.

And it's all about the world's most interesting ingredients, recipes, restaurants.

It covers the whole world.

And it's the result of years of work by multiple people on the Gastro Obscura team.

And so I hope that you're interested.

If you want to check it out, there's a link link in the episode description.

And in honor of this new book launch, we're making the podcast this week all about food.

And we're going to talk to some folks from the Gastro Obscura team.

Here today is Sam O'Brien, a writer from Gastro Obscura.

Hi, Sam.

Hi, Dylan.

So I found out you were working on what I think has got to be one of the most unique collections.

And it's a combination of two things that you don't, wouldn't think would go together.

It's recipes and gravestones.

Yeah, well, I've always been interested in cemeteries and graves and the stories they tell.

And a grave is just so fascinating because you have such a limited amount of space to tell someone's story.

So what someone decides to put on there is incredibly interesting to me.

And so just for fun, I always wander around cemeteries.

And whenever I travel, I visit the local cemetery.

So I'm always on the lookout.

Yeah, for fellow taphophile, I assume.

Yes, yes, of course.

Taphophiles unite.

Yeah, so one of my favorite cemeteries is Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

And I heard about a very unique gravestone known as the Spritz Cookie Gravestone.

And so basically what that is, is it's a grave and it tops off in an open book.

And you've probably seen graves like that before.

They're open and then they might have a scripture verse in there or something.

Yeah, sure.

And so here, instead of finding that normal Bible verse, it's a recipe for cookies.

And so I was hooked.

I had to know everything about this woman, everything about her cookies.

And it just started this quest of both learning about her and her recipe.

And then

That led me to a longer, larger journey of other recipe gravestones around the world.

And it's just been this wonderful quest of me trying to track these down and meet the family members who decided to pay tribute in this incredibly unique way.

Well, today, you're going to share with us the story of one of these gravestones.

Is that right?

I'm talking about the first one I found, the Spritz Cookie Gravestone.

That's right after this.

Man, okay, so to start with the first, do you ever go and actually see it in person?

Were you able to visit the grave site?

Yes, I was able to visit more than once.

It's actually in one of my favorite cemeteries, Greenwood Cemetery, which is located in Brooklyn, New York.

And Greenwood is just this incredibly old, beautiful cemetery.

A lot of people go to just walk around and take in the landscaping and the scenery.

The trees are gorgeous.

You can go bird watching there.

People actually used to picnic in Greenwood back in the day.

And this grave in particular is a little out of the way, but you'll be wandering in this sort of like grassy expanse and you'll know this grave when you hit it.

It's tall and it ends in a book on the top.

And when you walk up to the grave, you'll see that engraved in the book is a recipe for Spritz cookies.

Now, are you ready, Dylan?

I'm going to give you the recipe for Spritz cookies.

So good it was set in stone.

I do not have a pen and paper, but I will commit it to memory.

Here it is.

One cup of butter or margarine, three quarters of a cup of sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla, one egg, two and a quarter cups of flour, half a teaspoon of baking powder, and an eighth of a teaspoon of salt.

Now, who's the woman responsible for this?

You just look below on the grave, and you'll see this woman's name, Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson.

Naomi was born in 1921, and she died in 2009.

But that doesn't really tell us that much about her.

So I found her son and I called him.

Hello.

Hi, this is Sam O'Brien calling from Atlas Secura.

Oh, hi, how are you?

Good, how are you doing?

Not bad.

That's Richard Dawson.

And to hear him tell it, his mother's cookies were amazing.

We really loved them.

So my sister and my cousin George, my sister's name is Anita, we would basically wait for them to come out of the oven.

And as soon as they came out of the oven, we start eating them.

Still hot, still be a little burning.

It didn't matter.

Yeah,

if she turned her back,

we were eating them.

What was your favorite thing about them?

Like, uh, were just like that they were sweet, that they were warm, or

you know, I honestly don't think it was the cookies themselves, I think it was just the spirit of family, and it was just something that triggered

knowing that it was the holidays, and

that that it was

just really special to us.

So after talking about the recipe, Richard and I just started talking about his mom.

She spent most of her career working as a clerk for the post office.

But when she wasn't working, her real passion was baking.

Yeah,

she used to say that baking was so good, it would make you beat your mama.

She said

her baking was great.

She actually could have gone into business.

I mean, she made really nice cakes and cookies, and she would make rum balls and lemon squares, all sorts of things.

We lived with my mother and her two sisters, so they each had a specialty.

So my mother was the baker.

My aunt

Marie was

that would cook turkeys and things like that for the holidays.

And the oldest of the three, Sybil,

she would do all of the Caribbean

classics and favorites.

The family comes from Barbados.

Although Naomi herself was born in New York, she's a first-generation American in her family.

Her sisters are from Barbados and her parents as well.

And while her sister would make traditional Caribbean dishes like cuckoo or coconut bread.

The cookies themselves are of European origin and Richard wasn't quite sure where Naomi picked them up but that's the beauty of New York, the melting pot.

They came and they make spritz and then they also make kingfish and it's just this beautiful banquet.

It reminds me of like, you know, people who like have been eating their grandmother's like secret cookie recipe for like 40 years and they're like, oh, no one makes them like this.

They're so and then they find out it was literally taken from the back of the like cookie box.

You know what I mean?

Exactly.

But like, once something becomes a tradition like that, and you have it the same time every year, it starts to develop a totally different meaning.

And it really does taste different, right?

It tastes like a particular moment in time and with your family.

And so it's kind of a simple recipe in a way.

Was this sort of widely shared and known through the family?

No, she did not share it.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's funny because one time

I would bring cookies to the office during the holidays.

And of course, there were Spritz cookies.

My mother would make a big batch and she would make Spritz cookies, oatmeal, raisin cookies, all sorts of things.

So I remember a lady on my staff was, she was practically begging me for a recipe.

So I called my mother, I said, look, this lady likes the recipe.

She said, well, that's nice.

She wasn't giving it up.

So did she eventually give it to you guys?

We actually,

after her passing, she had everything written down.

She did have recipe books, so we did have the recipe.

But

she always said she was going to stay tight-lipped about her recipes.

Oh my God.

That's like,

that's like, yeah, she took it to the grave, basically.

She literally took it to the grave.

Yeah.

This actually might be the only grave it applies to but like the common joke with recipe gravestones is um you know my mother would say she would only share the recipe over her dead body

and here we are so

i don't know if there's like this is a good this is a good joke yeah

how do you think uh your your mother would feel about the the attention her cookie recipe is getting these days but you know it's funny because my mother was a a private person and she was somewhat of a shy person.

I think she would find it kind of weak that

she's getting all this attention.

And that her recipe is now out for all to see after she was so tight-lipped about.

Well, she may be a little bit pissed off on that, but I'll blame her.

Blame your sister, yeah.

How did the family decide to actually engrave this cookie recipe on Naomi's headstone?

Yeah, well, what was interesting to me is that I asked Richard if he'd ever heard of a recipe gravestone before, and he hadn't.

So this was just a totally original idea that his family had.

It was actually his sister, Anita's idea, to do it.

And they were just like, hey, this is one of our favorite memories of our mother.

And what a nice tribute this would be.

And they actually even made and served the cookies at the memorial after her funeral.

That is so nice.

What a lovely story.

Yeah, I liked that a lot.

It's more than just a recipe, it's an acknowledgement of really the love that went into her baking.

And it's a reflection of family because if you speak to anyone in my family and mention Scritz cookies, probably the first thing that will come out of their mouth is talking about my mother and the times we have.

Would you say when you or your sisters make spritz cookies, they live up to your mothers?

Well, I'll put it this way.

My sister has a lot of work to do.

You know, sometimes When graves have just stark information on them, you might not be remembering the happy times.

Like, and that's why what you choose to put on a grave in that very tiny space is so important.

And putting that personal touch is not just a nice tribute to your mom and what she meant to you, it's also for you as the living loved one, where you can not only look at this and see birth and death and her name, you see something that was truly beautiful to you.

And like a Bible verse, is sacred and it's sacred to you and your family.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's, and I, I don't know that I've thought about recipes quite in that term, but you're absolutely right.

The right recipe is is like a sacred piece of a family.

Exactly.

Totally.

I high love this.

I, there are so many layers to the onion here.

It's like there's family, there's tradition, there's food, there's the culture around that food.

There's so much.

And I love that this grave brought us to richard and naomi and it sounds like you've got a bunch more stories like this which is that's correct yes so when i found out about this one it just got me thinking are there other graves with recipes on them and there are

uh and i found uh eight in the united states and two in israel and these gravestones are like i call them my infinity stones because i want to collect them all and I'm like no there's got to be more out there like I found a peach cobbler recipe on a grave in Louisiana a fudge recipe in Utah

a yeast roll recipe in Israel an oatmeal cookie recipe with where there's a container of cool whip engraved literally on the grave.

And I found that grave with the help of the mayor of Nome, Alaska.

Yes.

Yeah, I cannot wait to hear more about these.

In the meantime, if you're out there and you know of a recipe grave, you know the person to tell, right?

Please, please, please email us at hello at atlasobscura.com.

Do it.

Do it.

This is going to be the definitive collection of recipe graves.

I have to say, I'm tempted to try the recipe.

I'm not sure I've ever had a Spritz cookie, to be honest.

I definitely haven't.

We have lived a deprived life, apparently.

But so you might be thinking, how do you top a story of gravestones and cookies?

Well, as it happens, Atlas Obscura has a two-part series on one of my favorite things in the world, the nutshell studies of unexplained death.

I don't want to ruin your enjoyment of the episode, so no spoilers, but it involves the first female police chief in the U.S., the birth of forensic science, and a bunch of dollhouses.

Enjoy the first part of this mini-series, and then go listen to the rest at Atlas Obscura, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Just a quick note, this is part one of a two-part series which both discuss death and suicide.

If you or someone you know is feeling depressed or you need to talk to someone, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

And there'll be more info in the show notes.

Okay, onto the show.

Once upon a time, Dollhouses weren't playthings.

Starting back in the 1600s, the Dachenhouse or miniature house wasn't meant for kids.

Instead, it was a kind of ostentatious display of wealth and the pastime of very wealthy women.

It was a big deal.

You know, before television and the internet, people had time on their hands.

The houses were handcrafted by the best artisans.

Each tiny chair could take as long as a real one to make.

And in an upscale part of Chicago, In 1930, there were once two women, both wealthy socialites, and these two women were both grand masters of creating beautiful, immaculate dollhouses.

One of the women was Narcissa Nyblack Thorne.

Narcissa Thorne did a series of really beautiful miniatures, ballrooms, grand hallways, foyers.

Meanwhile, her neighbor Frances Glesner-Lee was also making her own incredibly detailed miniatures.

She did a miniature of the entire Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Wow.

It's mind-boggling.

But along the way, something changed for Frances Glesner-Lee.

While her neighbor continued to make beautiful living rooms and foyers,

Frances began to create a collection of miniature scenes unlike any other in the world.

Collection of 18 dioramas, exquisitely detailed, furnished, and they all feature

little dolls representing dead people.

I'm Dylan Thuris, and this is Atlas Obscura, your guide to the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

This is part one of a two-part series, and today we're visiting the office of the chief medical examiner in Baltimore, Maryland, home to those 18 macabre miniatures.

Together, they're known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, tiny dollhouses which had a huge impact on the field of criminal investigation.

And we'll hear the story of Frances Glesner-Lee, the incredible woman who made them.

You know, she is the mother of forensic science and popular culture, yet people don't know who she is.

That's it for this.

My name is Bruce Goldfarb.

I am the executive assistant to the chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland.

So why would someone end up there?

What is the circumstance where a body ends up in your building?

Well,

I don't want to harsher mellow, but everybody dies.

Now, most people die in a hospital or in a nursing home where they're known to have some medical condition.

About 10% die from conditions that are obviously unnatural, such as an injury or violence, and about 10% die under conditions that aren't immediately explained.

They died during their sleep.

They didn't show up for work.

They're out in the yard or in a vehicle or just somewhere and we don't know what happened.

It basically runs like a clinic or a hospital where the patients are dead and the doctors are diagnosing why they died.

This is the work of the chief medical examiner.

And in the building where Bruce works, they're investigating cases of unexplained deaths, from sudden heart attacks to accidents to murders.

But the Maryland office is unique because it's currently also the home of those 18 dioramas of death.

Or as they're properly known.

The nutshell studies of unexplained death.

How did you end up sort of becoming unofficially in charge of the nutshell studies?

Really, it came down to I was the low man in the totem pole.

Now that you're a problem, you can deal with it.

You changed the light bulbs.

It's all, you know, so okay.

Bruce isn't joking.

He's the one who changes out the tiny toy train lights and flashlight bulbs that are used in the dioramas.

But he's also underselling himself.

Bruce was a journalist before he got the job, and he'd previously written about the history of the nutshells.

So it made sense for him to oversee them when he started working at the medical examiner's office.

And over the time he's been their steward, they've become kind of famous.

A stabbing with an adorable knife.

These charming dollhouses on display are in fact miniature death scenes.

I have never

seen a dollhouse like this.

There's been a documentary about them, multiple books, and they were recently shown as part of a Smithsonian exhibit.

And both CSI and NCIS have done episodes inspired by them.

And it's no surprise because they're incredible.

Each one is immaculate and horrifying.

They're beautifully crafted and tragic to contemplate.

Each scene is based on real-life cases.

Take, for example, the three-room dwelling from 1937.

There is a cutaway of the first floor of a home, a very nicely furnished living room.

with little books on the bookshelves and a little floor lamp that works and there's a a dead woman you know face down on the stairs and then there's the barn a two-story wooden barn made from actual barnwood where a farmer hangs from an apparent suicide the diorama includes a little story which interweaves with all the details that you can see this

farmer his name is eben wallace he's a disagreeable fellow and and a manipulative guy and he would threaten to hang himself to get his way until his wife gave in.

And so he would go into the barn and go through this whole ritual and put the rope around his neck.

And he usually stood on

a bucket.

But his wife left the bucket on top of the water pump that's on the side of the barn.

And instead, he stepped down what looks like an orange crate, which was not strong enough to hold his weight.

And he fell through it.

So there's no question he's hanging from the rope.

And all the evidence suggests that he did that himself.

But

did she purposefully move that bucket?

Maybe it's a homicide, sort of facilitating that?

There's the woodman's shack, the burned cabin, the red bedroom.

Each scene is a masterpiece, built by Frances Glesner-Lee.

Each detail was carefully considered.

Blood splatter was added with exacting detail, with Francis daubbing on each bit of blood using tiny dollops of nail polish.

Frances Glesner-Lee, who made the dioramas, spared no expense in furnishing them.

She paid to have real front page newspapers photographically reduced and made into a print block for a single impression, and that was it, just to have a newspaper that was sitting there on the floor, crumpled up.

There's a Newsweek magazine from September 1943, I believe it is.

And even though the magazine is laying there with the cover up, you pick it up and you look on the back side, there's an advertisement that is is actually the advertisement from that issue of the magazine.

Wow.

Frances Glesner-Lee was absolutely obsessive about those kinds of details.

These were not the grand ballrooms and foyers of her neighbor, Narcissa Thorne.

These were tragic scenes representing largely the poor, the neglected, the marginalized.

18 scenes of unexpected death, the kinds that police officers of the time might have actually encountered.

So why did Frances Glesnar Lee, a well-to-do socialite, at this point a grandmother, switch from creating miniature versions of the symphony orchestra to tiny, perfectly detailed scenes of death?

She lived the life of a socialite for most of her life.

And it wasn't until 1929 when she spent time with a pioneering medical examiner by the name of George Burgess McGrath, who was the medical examiner in Boston.

He told her stories about his work and explained the concepts of the medical examiner system.

Frances was an early reader of Sherlock Holmes.

And after talking to George McGrath, she was surprised to learn that in reality, the field of what we would call forensic investigation didn't really exist.

Before 1945, homicide detectives, police officers, had no training in forensic science.

So they would put the fingers through bullet holes in clothing and move the body and these sorts of things.

After she spent time talking with McGrath in the summer of 1929, Frances Glesnerly decided to dedicate her life to creating the field of legal medicine, basically to making a system for investigating death scenes.

So in 1931, she endowed the first ever Harvard Department of Legal Medicine.

In 1945, she established an endowment in McGrath's memory to create the Harvard Associates in Police Science.

And everything that she did was in her last decades of life.

Wow.

Even the nutshells of unexplained death, Frances didn't start working on those until she was well into her 60s.

She made them because she knew that they would have a purpose.

Blending her old hobby with her new mission, she created these 18 dioramas not as dollhouses, but as tools meant to teach people looking at scenes of death and tragedy, how to actually see them.

It would have been great to take the whole class to a real crime scene, but you can't do that.

And you can't always count on a scene when you need it, you know, so

it was the next best thing was to make little reproductions, little miniature crime scenes.

To this day, each year, a highly coveted seminar is held, the Francis Glesnerly Seminar on Homicide Investigation.

And it's done just as it was when it began in 1945.

The The students, who are all generally homicide detectives, are given a flashlight and a magnifying glass and told to examine the dioramas to try and identify all the details that matter.

They spend as much time looking at these dioramas as pretty much as they do as a real crime scene.

Some of them spend hours.

The dioramas are based on amalgamations of real cases, and there is a folder with those original cases kept under lock and key in the Maryland Medical Examiner's Office.

But these seminars aren't about solving the nutshells.

They're about learning how to look.

It really is about observing things that may be significant.

You have to recognize evidence so you can preserve it, so you can process it correctly, so you can interpret it correctly.

CSI New York, CSI Miami, NCIS New Orleans.

At this point, it feels like every city has its own crime scene procedural.

And of course, there are the podcasts, Serial, Criminal, My Favorite Murder, all great and part of an ever-expanding world of true crime podcasts.

But prior to Francis Glesnar Lee, crime scene investigation was barely even a field.

Earl Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason, dedicated one of his books to Francis Glesnar Lee.

And even the first forensic drama, a 1950 movie called Mystery Street, was directly inspired by Francis Glesnar Lee's work.

The police said this man murdered Vivian Heldon.

The scientists said

don't be too sure.

Frances Glesner-Lee was a

independently wealthy grandmother with no formal training who revolutionized forensic science.

And she is truly the mother of forensic science.

Everything that we come to know in a CSI type crime scene investigation, whether it's in real life or in popular culture from watching the shows, That's all directly traceable to Frances Glesner-Lee and the work that she did at Harvard Medical School.

The nutshell studies of unexplained death may be the most visible part of Frances Glesner-Lee's legacy, but they're only a small part of it.

Because her fight for creating a system of legal medicine, where determining the cause of death is done by trained professionals, is still very much underway.

On part two of this two-part series, we walk down the hall from the nutshells to another special room to learn just how cause of death is actually determined in America.

On part two, we go from miniature recreations to full-scale reenactments.

Yeah, I like saying that the Scarpetta house is the most violent room in Baltimore.

And I get to try my hand at being a corpse.

And did she say to you, do you want to be a dead body?

Yeah, basically.

She's like, I have this really cool opportunity for you.

Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs.

The production team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Camille Stanley, Willis Ryder-Arnold, Sarah Wyman, Manolo Morales, Tracy Samuelson, Peter Clowney.

Our technical director is Casey Holford.

And this episode was sound designed by John DeLore.

I'm Dylan Thuris, wishing you all the the wonder in the world.

See you tomorrow.

Witness Docs from Stitcher.