This Woman Re-Creates Recipes People Have Left On Their Gravestones, And It’s Helping Others Find Comfort In Death
I can almost guarantee you'll never be able to guess where the recipe for these cookies are from.
No, it's not from a cookbook. It's not from Bon Appetit, either.
It's from a gravestone in a New York cemetery, of course!
The cookies were baked by Rosie Grant, who is a Los Angeles–based librarian. They were the first of many recipes found on gravestones she's re-created in the last year.
Rosie, who goes by @ghostlyarchive on TikTok, shares her journey on the platform, from hunting down recipes to seeing them through in the kitchen. All together, her videos have accumulated over 3 million views.
Rosie told BuzzFeed she has visited three graves, which include the aforementioned Spritz cookie recipe from a gravestone in Brooklyn, and a date and nut bread from a stone in Erie County, New York, pictured below:
She's also made fudge from a recipe found in Logan, Utah. Aside from those three, she's made a few other recipes found on graves in other states which she hopes to visit in the future.
Rosie's journey started a year ago, when she was interning for a congressional cemetery. She started posting about the cemetery on TikTok and was quickly immersed in the #GraveTok subculture. Coincidentally, around the same time, she was learning how to cook and stumbled upon an article about the Spritz cookie recipe left on a gravestone. The rest became history.
#GraveTok is a TikTok subculture and community that includes people who are passionate about telling the stories of the deceased.
"I learned about the death positive community," Rosie told BuzzFeed. "[It's] the idea that society is better if we understand our own mortality and change our mindsets so that [death is] like a celebration of our lives, rather than something to be feared or ignored. So that's kind of where this whole thing came about."
Rosie has sourced the gravestones on various corners of the internet, including news reports, tweets, and even a wikipedia-esque site called Find a Grave. She's heard of eight graves with recipes in the US so far, and she hopes to keep finding more.
"I have not organically walked through a cemetery and found a recipe on my own, unfortunately," she said. "I mean, that would be the dream someday."
Some of the gravestones only include ingredient amounts and don't include actual cooking instructions, so Rosie has turned to her followers for help.
In doing so, she inadvertently fostered a cooking community that includes people who share tips and their own family recipes.
"A lot of people have weighed in with their own family recipes that's very meaningful to them," Rosie said.
For her next adventure, Rosie hopes to visit a grave on the West Coast. "I'm debating right now between one in San Francisco — it's a snickerdoodle cookies recipe — and then there's one in Iowa that are these Christmas cookies," she said.
Eventually, she hopes to visit them all, even venturing internationally to gravestones with recipes in other countries.
