Look &/or listen as my guest Rosie Grant shares the story of her Mirro cookie press!

As she lovingly holds this old-fashioned cookie press, she tells of her unexpected wild ride to TikTok fame.

While doing her cemetery internship at Congressional Cemetery her professor assigned the task of setting up a social media account. She half-heartedly started recording her journey, but then she came cross a special gravestone in my favorite cemetery, Historic Green-Wood Cemetery, in my old hometown of Brooklyn.

It was there she came across the gravestone of Naomi Odessa Miller-Dawson. Etched into what looks like a cookbook opened to a page was Naomi’s favorite recipe for Spritz Cookies. Rosie fell in love with the idea of people leaving favorite recipes behind for their loved ones AND strangers alike.

She decided to make these cookies, but had no real idea what a Spritz cookie was or how to make them. When she posted a video of her first bad attempt at making Naomi’s cookies she was flooded by beautiful stories of people sharing their grandmothers methods, family food traditions & MANY encouraged Rosie to get a cookie press for herself!

She has since found 17+ “recipe gravestones” & travels the country visiting, baking & eating at the graves of the dead. She has done this with strangers, some who turned into friends like Naomi’s family who Rosie met a year ago at Green-Wood. Naomi’s grandson is the keeper of the family’s secret recipes & her son has her original cookie press. See Things are important! Because they connect us to the memories.

Rosie is now sitting down at her ancestors graves, eating a meal & pondering how food connects us and nurtures us in so many more ways then the nutrients. Both her grandmothers died during the pandemic. She recalls fondly the yellow cake one grandmother made, straight from a box, for each of her grandchildren’s birthdays over the years. It wasn’t fancy, but she & her cousins miss those box cakes every year … they spoke about it at her funeral. Rosie makes it from time to time to remember her by & to feel her love which still lives on.

You can tell how much she LOVES this cookie press just by the way she lights up when she holds it & looks at it! I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of this woman’s warmth, enthusiasm & exuberance! Follow her @ghostlyarchive on TikTok & Instagram

This minisode was clipped from a LIVE virtual Show & Tale: My Favorite Thing Kitchen Edition with Historic Green-Wood Cemetery (Nov 2022) to build deeper connections, community & legacy one story of stuff at a time.

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