Beyond the grave

TikTok-famous JMU alumna recreates tombstone recipes

By SABINE SOLTYS

The Breeze

Steadying a glass bowl and whisk, Rosie Grant leans over her kitchen counter, staring intently at the instructions before her as she prepares to make another one of her famous gravestone recipes. She cracks an egg, mixing it in with the flour and baking powder. Pouring in the margarine, sugar, vanilla and salt, Grant quickly whisks all the ingredients together as she makes Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson’s spritz cookie recipe. Miller-Dawson died in 2008, and Grant found the spritz cookie recipe on her headstone.

Grant, a JMU alumna, graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English and media arts and design (SMAD) with a concentration in digital video and cinema (DVC) and a creative writing minor. Starting in 2021, Grant has now found and made 20 of these recipes written on the headstones of graves from all over the world, with the oldest one dating back to the 1990s. Through these recipes, Grant has risen to TikTok fame with over 170,000 followers and 6.6 million likes.

Grant said she first found out about these recipes when she was pursuing her master’s degree at the University of Maryland (UMD). In a class on social media algorithms, Grant learned how to manipulate an algorithm to go viral. Her professor, Jen Goldbeck, said going viral meant reaching “10,000 views on a new piece of content within seven days.”

As part of the class, Grant had to make a fresh TikTok account in the middle of the pandemic and post every day for three months. She said she decided to focus her page on her internship at the Congressional Cemetery archive in Washington, D.C. She discovered gravestone recipes, stumbling first across Miller-Dawson’s spritz cookie recipe in Brooklyn, New York. Grant made this recipe and put it on her TikTok. It garnered a million views overnight.

“It was very shocking,” Grant said. “It was one of those things where you post something that you think might do well and get 10 views, and for this I didn’t expect that much of it. I thought it was interesting but I didn’t expect this … Then people started to ask questions about the recipe and her and giving their own input on spritz cookies.”

As a result, Grant looked more into the lady on the gravestone and found other gravestone recipes that had gotten some small news and media attention and started collecting them. Grant has now located gravestone recipes ranging from the spritz cookies in New York to yeast bread in Israel.

“Something I learned at the cemetery is that graves are becoming a lot more personalized these days, with the oldest recipe coming from the 1990s,” Grant said. “If something was important to someone, you find that on their gravestone now.”

In the beginning of her fame, Grant found these recipes online. Now, she’s gone and visited three of the graves. As a result, she was able to meet Miller-Dawson’s family in New York at her gravesite and make the cookies with them. She also visited a grave in Utah to see her fudge recipe and one in Seattle to find a blueberry pie recipe.

“All of them are super cool,” Grant said.

“When talking to family members, none of them seemed to be aware of the others, which was really interesting. The two in Israel were especially interesting in that they had to be translated for us.”

Grant said she’s continued to focus on these gravestone pieces because she loves learning about what food means to people. She said she believes that when people have these conversations with one another about how they want to be remembered — through a recipe, for instance — and what their legacy will be, it’s helped make the topic of mortality easier to deal with. And for Grant, these legacies go back to what she learned in JMU professor Erica Cavanagh’s food writing class.

“Food connects to everything,” Grant said, “and I [had never] seen food that way before these recipes, in that it can be paired with different topics.”

Cavanagh has been teaching in the English department since 2007, focusing on teaching creative writing workshops and some general education classes.

In these creative writing workshops, Cavanagh said her goal is to help students have a platform and space where they’re supported in writing down their own experiences and finding their own voice. She said she also wants to give students the practical skills they can take beyond the class, such as paying attention to detail to create those powerful stories.

It was in her nonfiction food writing creative workshop in the spring of 2011 when Cavanagh met Grant. Cavanagh said she continued to work with Grant outside of this class on her honors thesis as well. Cavanagh said she remembers how ambitious and thoughtful Grant was when working on her thesis and applauded her journalism skills.

“Rosie is really inquisitive and that is a real asset of hers; she asks a lot of questions, and she is really curious,” Cavanagh said. “She is someone who needs to go and find the answers out for herself. I frankly don’t meet a lot of people that are that proactive. She is also just super thoughtful and generous and is one of these students that have kept up with me and Julie Sorge Way.”

English professor Julie Sorge Way also emphasized this attribute of Grant’s and spoke very highly of her and her TikToks. For 15 years, Sorge Way has taught mostly literature and writing classes and first met Grant in 2008 in her Survey of British Literature course.

Sorge Way said she came to see Grant’s appreciation for the “beauty and joy in the world and what really matters.” This passion has even led Grant to be on programs like The Kelly Clarkson Show and NPR, she said.

“She’s really had some great feedback, and you can see why her TikToks are super interesting,” Sorge Way said. “It really reflects some of the skills we do all the time in our literature and humanities classes. She is still an English major; you can feel it in her work.”

While Grant continues to focus on the gravestones, she mentioned she hopes to maybe create a cookbook based on these recipes. She also said she’d love to visit as many of these gravestone sites as she can, having already visited some in New York and Utah.

Grant said she encourages other JMU English students to follow in her footsteps and to focus on what they are passionate about. She makes the point that whatever might be interesting to a person now could be helpful to them in the future.

“Whatever the creative output is, I would recommend JMU students to pursue that [and] build those creative habits,” Grant said. “It’s fun to be in an environment where learning is encouraged, and it is okay to fail because that is just part of the process.”

CONTACT Sabine Soltys at soltysms@ dukes.jmu.edu. For more on the culture, arts and lifestyle of the JMU and Harrisonburg communities, follow the culture desk on Twitter and Instagram @ Breeze_Culture.