Woman Honors the Dead by Cooking the Recipes Found on Their Gravestones (Exclusive)

If you could be remembered through one dish of food, what would it be? That’s the question Rosie Grant has been grappling with for years.

Grant, 35, was pursuing her Master’s of Library Science at the University of Maryland, where she focused on digital archives, when she secured an internship at the Congressional Cemetery archives in Washington, D.C. 

Following her professor’s suggestion, Grant decided to set up a TikTok account while studying social media networks. At first, she just shared information about the cemetery where she was working, learning more about the different ways people choose to be memorialized.

It was through this process of discovery that she came across Naomi Odessa Miller Dawson’s grave in New York’s Greenwood Cemetery. To Grant’s surprise, Dawson’s gravestone included a recipe for a spritz cookie on top. 

Grant found the recipe at a time when she was experimenting with cooking herself, and decided to give it a try.

She documented the experience on her TikTok, and it went viral. Her comments and inbox were then flooded with people telling her how they make the recipes of their late loved ones as a way to keep them close.

“Food has this ability to bring back the memories of ones we’ve lost,” Grant tells PEOPLE exclusively. While learning more about Dawson, she came across others like Kay Andrews in Utah, who had a famous fudge recipe on her grave, and Maxine Menster in Iowa, who shared her special Christmas cookies.

“I was learning about a gravestone recipe. I would post the process. Eventually, families started reaching out to me,” she shares. “Once I got to about 10 recipes, I started an archiving project, seeing where these people were buried, what they had in common.”

“With the family’s permission, I started interviewing them to get the stories of the person behind the recipe,” she continues. “I now have approximately 45 recipes. I just learned about my first European one.”

The project has grown through her social media and word of mouth. When people contact her about particular gravesites, she tries to get in touch with their living relatives.

On many occasions, she has made the recipe with the family, and watches as they’re transported back to their loved one’s kitchen, where they can enjoy their dish together again, even just in spirit.

Her project has taken the Los Angeles resident all around the country. On her trip to Alaska, she discovered a no-bake recipe that required a trip to the store for shelf-stable ingredients, her most expensive recipe to date.

The gravestone itself features a Tupperware container for storing cookies, allowing people to give a treat back to the original creator and other cemetery goers.

“I’m being allowed into a little piece of their lives, where their food lives with so many more stories than just this one recipe,” Grant shares.

“It was a very special trip,” she said of her journey to Alaska. “I’m so grateful to the families for letting me go along. The main reason a lot of them are letting me do this and come in and have these experiences is they love their person, and they believe in sharing the recipe with anyone who wants it.”  

While Grant has enjoyed every recipe she’s made, she admits that she has made some mistakes in the kitchen, which the internet quickly pointed out. She says her journey on social media has been a “humbling one.”

“I like cooking, but I like eating more,” she says. “Almost every single one of these recipes I made incorrectly the first time, and I would make it as I was reading it on a gravestone. People will then tell me what I might be doing wrong.”

“So I’ll cook it again and again and crowdsource it from people who are telling me how to cook something properly, which is helpful. I’ve learned a lot,” she says.

Grant’s cookbook, To Die For, comes out on October 7 and will feature 40 gravestone recipes, including the one she plans to eventually put on her own resting place.

“[It will be] clam linguine or any clam-based dish, it’s a very nostalgic recipe,” she reveals. “I had it as a kid. I love the smell of it. It fits onto a gravestone and it’s not too difficult.”

Grant also shares that through this process, she’s learned a lot about grief and the importance of keeping memories — and food — alive.

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“There are a lot of taboos around talking about with your loved ones,” she shares. “How do you want to be remembered? It can change, it doesn’t have to mean that these conversations are final.”

“That’s why I liked the idea of gravestone recipes, because it’s a much easier, more lively topic,” she adds. “It’s a healthy, good thing to talk about it, even if it’s uncomfortable.”

Grant notes that “grief can manifest in so many different ways,” but for many people, making recipes that remind them of their loved ones can help them “cope” with the complex emotions of love and loss.

“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve, as long as it makes you feel somewhat comforted in your own different way, but it can look like a lot of different ways,” she adds.