Cooking with the Dead: Recipes san Stories from Fans on the Road by Elizabeth Zipern
- Stuart Ake
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Published 1995 by St. Martin's Paperbacks
Powered by generators, propane tanks, and solar panels, Deadheads manage to create a plethora of beautiful dishes at most any venue they travel to.
Long before brightly wrapped food trucks became fixtures of urban dining, Deadheads were serving curries, egg rolls and stir-fries from the backs of vans in concert parking lots. Armed with camp stoves, coolers and hand-lettered menus, inventive cooks transformed stretches of empty asphalt into temporary neighborhoods.
Elizabeth Zipern’s Cooking with the Dead: Recipes and Stories from Fans on the Road is an ethnography disguised as a cookbook. It preserves a vanished ecosystem of cooks, vendors, travelers and improvisers whose contributions rarely appear in histories of the Grateful Dead.
Between the fall of 1993 and the fall of 1994, Zipern traveled from show to show collecting recipes and interviewing the people who fed the touring community. She became a participant-observer, recording not only what Deadheads ate but how they worked, traveled and supported one another.
Cooks worked with limited refrigeration, modest budgets and whatever equipment could fit inside a van. Despite those constraints, the menu was ambitious. Travelers returned from Southeast Asia, Central America and elsewhere carrying recipes and spices that blended with whatever could be found at the nearest supermarket. Indian burritos, Himalayan tacos and improvised stir-fries emerged from equal parts resourcefulness and necessity.
Fresh vegetables, whole grains and globally inspired cooking were commonplace in Dead parking lots years before farmers markets became fashionable. Those of us who wandered the 'Lot' accepted it as normal. Looking back, it seems anything but. Dozens of independent cooks prepared inexpensive, nourishing meals for thousands of people without commercial kitchens, corporate backing or social media. Burning Man aside, I don't know of another subculture that built anything quite like it.
When Cooking with the Dead appeared in 1995, I had already drifted from the scene. I still caught the occasional Jerry Garcia Band show at the Warfield, but the urgency to attend every performance had faded. Curiously, those final touring years have become the least distinct in my memory. Shows from 1984 through 1991 retain flashes of technicolor detail, while the years immediately preceding Garcia’s death have largely blurred together.
One of the unexpected pleasures of launching Grateful Dead Book Reviews has been returning to books I either overlooked or failed to appreciate when they first appeared. Few have rewarded that second reading as richly as Cooking with the Dead. Its greatest strength lies not in the recipes, but in the people who shared them.
Throughout this volume and its companion, Made with Love, Zipern lets vendors tell their own stories. One contributor, Tom, laughs at the unlikely path that carried him from molecular biology to the Giants Stadium parking lot:
The fun part of the story is that, here’s this guy who’s working with radio isotopes in DNA and protein, and carrying out all these funky DNA extractions, and now he’s, like, making egg rolls at a Grateful Dead parking lot.
The parking lot brought together scientists, craftspeople, cooks, wanderers and weirdos who found unconventional ways to finance the next stretch of road while contributing something useful to the community. Selling a plate of stir-fry or a breakfast burrito filled the gas tank, but it also fed strangers and sustained a traveling society built around improvisation, resourcefulness and generosity.
As a cookbook, recipes in Cooking with the Dead remain practical and approachable today. Chapters devoted to Main Dishes, Desserts, Pastas, Sandwiches, Burritos and Beverages rely on ordinary ingredients and an assumption that meals should nourish a crowd. Some recipes inevitably reflect the earnest whole-grain vegetarianism of the early 1990s. However, that is part of the charm. They were written for cooks feeding friends, strangers and hungry travelers rather than chasing the latest culinary trend.
As a historical document, I found the book to be even more compelling. Even as scene was at its commercial apex, Zipern understood that these recipes could preserve more than a list of ingredients and cooking instructions. They could preserve the habits, values and rituals of a subculture operating in plain sight.
I had my first samosa at my first Grateful Dead show.
I was sixteen, obsessed with punk rock and convinced I was wise to the world. Like many sixteen-year-olds, I mistook certainty for wisdom. In reality, I was a sheltered, self-centered prat who had barely ventured beyond the suburban dining circle of burgers, fries, grinders and Connecticut pizza.
Nothing had prepared me for the scene. Most concerts have a handful of folks selling t-shirts from the trunk of a car. Dead shows were a travelling village of vendors, artists, freaks, fortune tellers, dogs and drum circles. The carnival of color, sound, aroma and flavor was overwhelming. Even the air smelled different. The heady blend of patchouli, pot, body odor and simmering spices from camp stoves hinted at a world I didn’t know existed.
Memories of that first show are unreliable. Because I didn’t know the songs, memories of the concert consist of implanted recollections constructed from repeated listenings of the tape. However, I distinctly remember the crowd’s lockstep interplay with the band, the bewilderment of Drums>Space and brief conviction that Jerry Garcia had transformed into a Cabbage Patch Kid.
I also remember buying something called a samosa.
People were raving about them, and the word itself sounded cool. I couldn’t have told you what Indian food was. I certainly didn’t know whether the dude selling them had ever been to India, but he was likely a twenty-something, white hippie perched behind a deep fryer.
I wish I could tell you that first bite changed my life. It didn’t.
But, the word samosa stayed with me and introduced the possibility there were cuisines, ingredients and traditions that had never crossed my woeful suburban path. Looking back, it seems fitting that my first glimpse of a larger culinary vision did not in begin in a restaurant or on a visit to a far off land, but in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead show.
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