You won’t find this recipe in any church cookbook.

Mix 125 sacks of cement, 20 tons of sand, 64 tons of local rock, 3 tons of decorative rock, 4 1/2 tons of brick, and one rock from the Calista Catacombs at Rome, and what do you get? A Byzantine grotto! At least that’s what Father Peter N. Scheier got when he began erecting, in 1927, St. Peter’s Grotto at tiny Farmer, South Dakota.

The quaint stone marvel on the prairie measures 13 1/2 feet square. Turrets decorate the four corners, and an open-air cupola lights up the three altars inside.

Why was the grotto designed in a Byzantine style — a unique architectural form for a manmade cave? Only Father Scheier knows for sure, and he’s long gone to his heavenly reward. But his “grotto recipe” still stands — as solid as the rock of Saint Peter.