A woman has found a unique source of specialty recipes, shunning cookbooks in favor of cemeteries, where she tracks down gravestones with eating instructions engraved on them.
Rosie Grant from Los Angeles, California is a librarian and TikToker with a passion for baking and history; In recent months, the tombstone enthusiast has found a very quirky way to combine her two passions by recreating recipes she finds on tombstones.
Rosie has committed to finding tombstones describing delicious dishes, while her social media is filled with clips of her searching and recreating the recipes.
The TikToker has prepared several dishes — including two favorites: Spritz Cookies and Fudge — and the baker even travels across the country to find recipes, traveling from state to state to recreate the best graveyard dessert.
Los Angeles, California’s Rosie Grant has gone viral after discovering and recreating recipes written on tombstones
The librarian and TikToker has a clear passion for baking and graveyards, and has combined the two over the past year to share her favorite recipes with her followers
Rosie’s baking journey began a year ago when she was an intern for a convention cemetery.
She started using social media to post about the graveyard and quickly became hooked on #GraveTok, which is filled with many other gravestone enthusiasts detailing their graveyard finds.
Around the same time, Rosie was learning to cook and stumbled across an article about the spritz cookie recipe that was left on a gravestone.
After reading the article, she was determined to find more tombstone recipes.
She then posted a video with the caption, “I’m going to start making recipes out of tombstones.”
In the video, Rosie made the spritz cookies based on ingredients she found at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.
Although there were no instructions on the tombstones, the biscuits turned out well and became Rosie’s most popular and famous replicas.
Speaking to the Guardian, Rosie revealed the recipes weren’t that easy to come by and she found most of them online.
The baker has recreated many different recipes, including snickerdoodle cookies, peach cobblers, date nut bread and blueberry pie
Rosie’s baking journey began a year ago when she was an intern for a convention cemetery and stumbled across an article with a recipe from a grave
Speaking to BuzzFeed, Rosie noted that after learning about the “death-positive community,” she shared her dishes to reduce the stigma surrounding mortality.
She said: “I’ve only found about 10 so far, mostly through online searches.”
Rosie has used news reports, tweets and a site called Find a Grave to discover the graveyard crockery.
She has made many different dishes including snickerdoodle cookies, blueberry glazed pie, peach cobbler, fudge, spritz cookies and date nut bread.
A recipe to die for! The spritz cookie recipe that Rosie loves
While the tombstone doesn’t describe exactly what to do, it does list the ingredients needed to make these delicious cookies:
- A cup of butter
- 3/4 cup sugar
- A teaspoon of vanilla
- An egg
- Two and 1/4 cups flour
- Half a teaspoon of baking soda
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
In an interview with BuzzFeed, Rosie said the first three graves she visited included the recipes of spritz cookies, date nut bread from a gravestone in Erie County, New York, and a fudge recipe she discovered in Logan, Utah and that became one of her favorites.
Speaking to BuzzFeed, Rosie noted that after learning about the “death-positive community,” she shared her dishes to reduce the stigma surrounding mortality.
‘[It’s] the idea that society is better when we understand our own mortality and change the way we think about it [death is] like a celebration of our lives instead of something to fear or ignore. So that’s kind of where this whole thing came from.’
“Personally, I am very afraid of my own mortality. “So I think a final is just a kind of consolation for me [death] – even just conversations with my own family like: “Where do I want to be buried? How do I want to be remembered?”
“I feel like the tombstone recipes lend themselves to speaking about really difficult topics in a simpler way.”
Though she’s worked hard to recreate and discover the tombstone bowls, she noted that she doesn’t have to find one herself just yet.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t go organically through a graveyard and found a recipe myself.
“I mean, that would be the dream one day.”
Eventually, Rosie’s dream is to visit all the tombstones around the world that have recipes written on them.
Social media users have flooded Rosie’s comments section with praising the idea, even noting how “healthy” the gesture was.
One user said: “Kind of amazing to imagine how happy the recipes brought each individual, obviously it was her love language and she chose to share it.”
Another user added, “I had no idea this was a thing and it’s such a lovely idea – both that the recipes exist and that you make them.”
“What a cool way to keep her legacy going,” wrote one user.
“Something about it is just insanely healthy. even after death they share their love,” commented another user.