Do you have a favorite memory of growing up? I sure do. I distinctly remember visiting my grandmother and smelling the scent of babka (Polish bunt cake), which freshly came out of the oven. It’s something I’ll never forget.
But what if you could recreate somebody’s beloved recipe ? Would you do that? I’m about to share a story of a woman who recreates recipes she finds on people’s tombstones. I kid you not.
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Rosie Grant, a digital librarian living in Washington, D.C., is doing something pretty unusual and documenting it on social media. She finds recipes etched into people’s gravestones and recreates them in her kitchen.
Here’s how it all started.
Grant started her TikTok account, @ghostlyarchive , as a school project while studying library science at the University of Maryland. She never thought she would gain much traction, but boy, was she wrong.
At that time, she was interning in the archives of the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
When a professor suggested she start posting about her internship and the cemetery, that’s what she started doing. But to keep it lighthearted, she decided to do something a little different.
She stumbled upon a recipe on a gravestone and decided to try it out.
A woman named Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson was buried at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, after her death in 2008 at 79 years of age. Her gravestone had an etching of a simple recipe for spritz cookies, which intrigued Grant.
So she made it and posted about it online.
And to her surprise, people really loved the idea. Grant captioned the video by saying “I’m going to start making recipes from gravestones.” I guess that really resonated with her audience.
Since then, she’s made it into a series.
And now, she has made about 13 different recipes she found on people’s gravestones. Since Grant isn’t a baker, the exercise required some trial and error. Many recipes didn’t come with instructions, so she had to guess how to bake them.
That must’ve been fun, huh?
Grant has also relied on people’s suggestions left on her videos so she can perfect the recipe by trying it over and over again. She has tried a fudge recipe engraved on a tablet on a woman’s tombstone in Utah, as well as a recipe for nut rolls from a woman in Israel.
Grant explains that the recipes left on people’s gravestones create a sort of nostalgic connection between the loved ones.
“These recipes feel like a more tactile, all-senses-included way to remember someone rather than only using your memory,” she told Today .
I don’t know about you, but I really love that. It’s true that when we’re in mourning, food becomes very comforting.
So let me ask you this.
If you were to have one recipe etched on your gravestone, what would it be? Hmm, that’s a tough one. I wish I had a favorite cake that I make, but I suck at baking, hehe.
So I would probably have to leave a yummy soup or stew. Either way, I hope this story inspired you to venture into your kitchen and tackle a beloved one’s recipe someday.