Rosie Grant who is popular for her cooking videos using recipes from gravestones, met with the family of Naomi Miller-Dawson, whose headstone is adorned with the recipe for her famous spritz cookies.
When Rosie Grant says a recipe is to die for, she's not kidding.
The 33-year-old, who is popular for her cooking videos on social media, gets her recipes from gravestones.
“This is the grave of Kay Andrews, she has a famous fudge recipe,” Grant tells Inside Edition from inside a cemetery.
Besides birth and death dates and messages such as “rest in peace,” some dearly departed across the U.S. have been known to leave their favorite recipes on their tombstones.
“There's an ice cream recipe in Maine and snickerdoodles in California,” Grant says. “People are being remembered the way they want to and just so happens that people have a special recipe.”
And the recipes have served as more than just inspiration for cooking for Grant.
A recipe for spritz cookies adorns the Brooklyn tombstone of Naomi Miller-Dawson, who died in 2009 at the age of 87. “I was like, oh, I’ll try to cook it, I’m curious what these cookies taste like,” Grant says.
Miller-Dawson’s own family met with Grant, telling her the matriarch baked the special cookies every Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“This recipe was a closely-guarded secret with my mother,” Miller-Dawson’s son, Richard, says. “She did not give it out. People would ask for the recipe, and she would say, no.”
Instead, Miller-Dawson literally took the recipe to her grave. Now her secret cookie recipe is out, and Grant is among the bakers who have decided to carry it on.
“She would be happy to know that she's remembered because of her baking,” Richard says.
Naomi Miller-Dawson’s Spritz Cookies
Yields five dozen or more
Ingredients
One cup room temperature butter or margarine
¾ cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
2 ¼ cups un-sifted flour
½ teaspoon baking powder
⅛ teaspoon salt
Instructions
Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a bowl, cream the butter or margarine thoroughly. Gradually beat in the sugar, vanilla, and egg. Add flour gradually with baking powder and salt. Mix until thoroughly combined. The resulting dough should be soft.
Refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes.
Working in batches, squeeze the dough through a cookie press onto an ungreased baking sheet. Leave about two inches between each cookie. If desired, you can decorate the cookies with bits of dried fruits, nuts, or chocolate chips. Bake for 8–10 minutes, until a light golden brown. Allow the cookies to cool completely on a rack.
