A cemetery is perhaps the most unexpected place to find recipes to prepare at home for dinners with family or friends. Nevertheless Rosie Grant33-year-old student and aspiring archivist, has managed to combine two of her greatest passions – for cooking and for cemeteries – and to make recipes of the deceased one of his favorite hobbies. “It all started during the lockdown,” the woman wrote for the Guardian. “Like many, I tried cooking for the first time and created a TikTok account. When the pandemic started, I had just started an internship at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington DC, one of the oldest cemeteries in the United States. “
Her professor advised her to use her new social profile to document the internship and so was born “ghostlyarchive”, The phantom archive. The algorithm did the rest and in less than a year Grant’s business went viral. “I discovered the The cemetery of TikTokwhich is a gigantic niche, ”the woman told al Washington Post, explaining that he found countless cemetery-themed accounts. “They define themselves “tafofili”», People with a passion for cemeteries, funerals and tombstones. But Grant went further and for the first time brought together two audiences, that of the Graveyard TikTok and that of the Sweets TikTok.
The first recipe discovered and reproduced at home was that of biscotti spritz, a simple list of ingredients engraved on Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s tombstone in Brooklyn, New York. Rosie recovered while she was cooking them and then published the video on the social network, where it exploded, reaching more than 80 thousand likes and 400 thousand views. “They’re to die for»,“ They are to die for ”, he concluded with a pun in his TikTok.
Grant began looking for other recipes engraved on the gravestones, until he found a few in the United States and two in Israel. For the past year he has been making Christmas cookies, no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookies, date bread, walnut rolls, yeast pie, peach pie, snickerdoodle cookies, blueberry pie and cheesecake. His passion also led her to travel. For the second recipe she’s gone in Utahin Logan, on the grave of Martha Kathryn “Kay” Kirkham Andrews, where the procedure for making her famous fudge.
Until now they are just over a dozen recipes discovered on gravestones in New York, Iowa, Alaska, Louisiana, California, Utah, Washington and Israel. Rosie he only visited three, but his goal “is to visit them all”. “In addition to learning to cook, I really enjoyed researching women’s lives behind the recipes: so far all the tombstones I have found were of women – concludes Grant in the Guardian -. There was a Holocaust survivor, a person who worked at the post office all her life, and a woman in Alaska who had the Cool Whip brand logo engraved on her gravestone. ‘