As Halloween approaches, an American resurrects cooking recipes found… on graves

For some, tombstones can evoke mourning, for others the homage paid to a loved one, or even, with a little imagination, a emaciated hand that emerges from the freshly turned earth.

But there is hidden, for the discerning eye, a real book of culinary recipes that an American has begun to explore on Tik Tok, where her videos published under the @ghostlyarchive account have been viewed millions of times.

Peach crumble, blueberry pie or soft caramels: for each gourmet epitaph, Rosie Grant, a 33-year-old librarian, proceeds in the same way.

Faced with limited instructions – “not much room on a tombstone“, she confides to AFP – she must first guess the cooking time and temperature, before the comments posted under the video of her first attempt allow her to refine the following ones.

It was by chance that Rosie Grant came across her first recipe from beyond the grave, that of Viennese shortbread by Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson, who died in 2009 at age 87 and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. .

Then an intern in the digital archives of a graveyard from Washington, she discovers the world of taphophiles, lovers of tombs and other necropolises. She launches a Tik Tok account dedicated to the unexpected wonders of these places of meditation and, by inquiring, ends up finding Mrs. Dawson’s recipe on the internet.

“It’s not just that this woman liked biscuits (…), she had the ingredients on her grave! I found it amazing“, says the librarian, who has since moved to Los Angeles. “What is that ? What is this recipe? How do they taste? I was so curious.”

appeasement

Since this first video, posted on October 1, Rosie Grant has discovered a dozen recipes – most of them sent to her by Internet users -, garnered 108,000 subscribers and millions of views on Tik Tok just before Halloween, the American holiday which honors ghosts. Relatives of the deceased whose recipes she makes have even contacted her.

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All the recipes she found are on the tombstones of women, most of whom died less than thirty years ago. “Many of them therefore have grandchildren and great-grandchildren on Tik Tok. Several of them commented on the videos saying: ‘Hey, this is my grandma, this is the recipe we used to make, I recommend that you make it like this’“, says Rosie Grant with enthusiasm.

Between two sweet and savory dishes, the librarian explores catacombs in her videos, recounts the lives of women accused of witchcraft during the famous Salem trials, shares anecdotes about the lives of buried celebrities or recounts, for example, how the custom of picnicking at the cemetery went out of fashion at the beginning of the 20th century.

For Rosie Grant, who lost her two grandmothers during the pandemic, this journey has brought some relief. “This whole process made me realize that people and society are better off when you reflect on your own mortality. And not in the ‘Yippee, death’ sense, but rather say to yourself ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter that we all die one day’ and enjoy your life to the fullest.”

For Halloween, Rosie Grant will try a new recipe from beyond: apricot ice cream. And at the end of the video, she will add these words that conclude, with the meaning of the formula, each of her Tik Tok: “It’s a killer.”

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