Dead in the Kitchen: The Official Grateful Dead Cookbook by Gabi Moskowitz
- Stuart Ake
- Jun 20
- 4 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
Published 2025 by Weldon Owen
Whether you spent your salad days following the band or you’ve only ever listened to recordings, this cookbook aims to help you get in the Dead-inspired cooking mood by conjuring the experience of attending a show through food.
Kitchen Improvisation. In Dead in the Kitchen: The Official Grateful Dead Cookbook, Gabi Moskowitz invites readers to view recipes as starting points rather than fixed instructions. Many cookbooks are built around obedience: buy the ingredients, follow each step as if receiving a commandment. Moskowitz offers enough clarity for readers who want to cook that way, but the book also encourages something more playful. Drawing inspiration from the improvisational spirit of the Grateful Dead, she gives home cooks a map, a compass and permission to let their taste buds to tinker and tweak in pursuit of flavor. The section entitled “Riff Break” offers suggestions and inspiration for home cooks who need a meal from whatever happens to be in the cupboard or refrigerator. In that sense, Dead in the Kitchen is both a cookbook and a cooking book, echoing the broader lesson of Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: learn the structure, then trust yourself enough to play.
Centered around fresh ingredients and plant-based meals, the book is divided into sections loosely tied into the flow of a Grateful Dead show. The first centers on dishes one might expect from the parking lot scene, exploring one of the great under-documented features of Deadhead culture. Before camping was pushed to the margins of the scene in the early 1990s, the parking lot was an adventurous, globally flavored culinary village operating out of the trunks of hundreds of cars. Dawn might feature a pour-over coffee stand perched next to Heads working a griddle full of breakfast burritos or chapatis. Throughout the day, and again after the show, one could find samosas, stir-fries, curries, falafel, spaghetti and whatever else could be assembled from a cooler and a camp stove.
Subsequent sections continue the narrative arc of a Grateful Dead show: “Dressing Room” is devoted dressings and sauces, “Opening Act” focuses on snacks, “Tune-Ups” is centered around soups and salads, “First Set” addresses quick, casual entrees akin to the shorter songs that opened the evening, while “Second Set” offers showstoppers built for the main event. Following suit, desserts arrive as the “Encore”.
Cookbook geeks will appreciate the layout and photography, which rival gorgeously photographed volumes like Ivan Orkin’s Ivan Ramen or Naz Deravian’s Bottom of the Pot. But a beautiful cookbook only gets you so far. The more important question is whether the food works. Moskowitz delivers. The recipes are flavorful, clear and easy to follow. Instead of relying on the punishing heat of cayenne and the scorching reaches of the Scoville scale, the author leans into layered depth: spice, acid, herbs and texture. The Curried Vegetable Pot Pie and Lemongrass Tempeh Banh Mi were especially strong, the kind of dishes that make the book feel useful beyond its Deadhead appeal.
The foreword by Mollie Katzen acts as a bridge, lending credibility to Moskowitz’s culinary chops and credence to Deadhead food culture. Katzen prepped meals for the Jerry Garcia Band going back to the 1970s, and her Moosewood Cookbook helped define American vegetarian cooking with its hand-drawn recipes, unpretentious voice and emphasis on communal dining. Katzen’s presence places Moskowitz’s book in a lineage where cooking is not only about fueling bodies, but about gathering people around a table, campsite, tailgate or kitchen counter.
Moskowitz understands that food, like music, can be both practical and transportive. The result is a cookbook that honors the Dead’s improvisational ethos by bringing it into the kitchen, where fresh ingredients, a flexible recipe and a hungry group of people can become something worth gathering around.
Check Prices | ||
Before an Oakland Coliseum run, I convinced friend Sue Long we could finance our tickets by baking apple pies.
My mother was a noted amateur baker in Blacksburg, Virginia, rising before dawn to craft fresh bread, biscuits, cookies and pies. Around town she became known as the “Cookie Lady,” even receiving a hooded sweatshirt bearing the title. Convinced I’d inherited her talent through osmosis, selling homemade pies to Deadheads seemed like a reasonable business plan.
We started at sunrise, the top crust of each pie crowned with a thirteen-point lightning bolt. Fresh from the oven, they looked and tasted magnificent.
Logistical shortcomings became apparent on the walk to the 19th Street BART station. Transporting six apple pies, whilst shlepping paper plates, forks, napkins and a carving knife, through downtown Oakland and across public transit required considerably more coordination than anticipated. And anyone who’s walked from the Coliseum BART station knows the journey doesn’t end at the platform. There’s still a long pedestrian bridge, flowing with Deadheads, drum circles, dealers, dancers, dogs and chaos.
Fortunately, fresh apple pie has a way of attracting hungry Heads. One by one our pies disappeared. However, with every slice, the carefully detailed lightning bolt gave way to ragged patches of exposed filling and shattered crust.
The only casualty of note came when an exceptionally toasty customer, balloon in one hand, pie in the other, stumbled and sent his slice to the pavement. After the time and care we’d put into baking, the smushed wedge looked tragic lying on the concrete.
By showtime the pies were gone and we’d earned enough to cover our tickets. That evening, after more than one hundred shows, I finally caught my first “Casey Jones”. While Sue had seen the Dead, she wasn’t hardcore Head, so she couldn’t understand why the crowd erupted when the opening riff began. She assumed the band played it regularly, unaware it was the first California performance since 1984.
We never tried financing another show with homemade pies. But for one December afternoon, fresh apple pie proved worthy currency on the Lot.
Comments