Mariah-Rose Marie has long loved having friends over to cook and eat together. Those friends often marvel at her kitchen ways. “I wasn’t really using measuring spoons,” she says. “You feel it out. You taste it as you go.”
These lessons came from her mom and grandmother. Marie’s mom ran educational workshops out of their homes as they moved around to California, Texas, Connecticut, and Ohio. The workshops included cooking, which helped Marie feel comfortable in the kitchen at a young age. From her grandmother, she gained strong feelings about making cooking accessible: “Otherwise kids are discouraged from learning.”
As an adult, though, Marie turned her attention to animation, working on shows like Clone High and DC Super Hero Girls. She also dabbled in comics, where she felt she could talk about subjects that she didn’t have the opportunity to explore as a Storyboard Artist. She’d write and draw her feelings and fun anecdotes from her day-to-day life. “People really responded to that on social media,” she says. Around 2018 she started to get requests from publications, and over the past years her freelance comic work has ranged from The New Yorker to Eater.com.
This online attention led indie publisher Silver Sprocket to reach out to Marie asking if she had any book ideas. She sent them a simple one-paragraph pitch for Cook Like Your Ancestors, and they loved it. Working at Titmouse, she began tackling the book on the weekends with her inspiration: her grandmother. They explored Marie’s belief that there is a more honest and approachable way of cooking beyond the confines of recipes, a philosophy inked on the cover with the subtitle: An Illustrated Guide to Intuitive Cooking with Recipes from Around the World.
But there was a bit of a paradox. If intuitive cooking is in fact intuitive, how do you teach it? Marie’s idea was to provide—alongside recipes—friendly guidance for trusting your own instincts in the kitchen. She shares insights about tools, ingredients, and methods, such as measurements using the hand (i.e. a thumb of ginger) and the general patterns found in cooking sauces, soups, stews, and stir fry dishes.
To gather recipes, Marie threw out an open call to everyone she knew and on her social media. She had only a few requirements. The recipes had to be naturally vegan or vegetarian, and she wanted to hit as many food regions as possible and showcase as many different cooking styles as she could.
Testing recipes challenged her own intuitive skills, since they arrived in many forms, from a simple list of ingredients to instructions fleshed out to the last gram. Working with her editor, she sought consistent recipe instructions that didn’t compromise her intuitive approach. She wanted people to trust their gut and not be intimidated.
Equally important is the emphasis on ancestral cooking. “My people have been here for the whole span of things, before there was an America,” she says. Marie is of mixed Afro-Indigenous American and European heritage. She believes that by connecting with the ingredients one’s people used and might still use, you automatically start to open up: “Maybe memories become unlocked,” she says, or you bond with a grandparent over something that only came up because of a particular recipe.
With its distinct lines and earthy colors, the cookbook’s artwork may seem simple, but the design is deceptively nuanced. Marie played with the alphabets and languages of different cultures, incorporating that into the typography, and focused on unique details with each recipe, like an illustration of the person or people who contributed it.
Marie has signed two more book contracts. One is for A Quick and Easy Guide to Healthy Relationships. Due out in late 2025, it’s part of a series for kids, focusing on family, friends, and community. The second is what she calls her big debut, a graphic novel, Go Back and Get It, to be published in 2028 by the Random House Children’s imprint Make Me A World. With main characters based on Marie and her sister, as well as a bit of magic, she calls it “ancestral fantasy.”
Cook Like Your Ancestors has been a journey for Marie, one filled with both joys and sorrows. Her beloved grandmother died right before she signed the book’s contract. The project was something she’d hoped they could craft together. Instead, it became Marie’s way of honoring her, just as she honors ancient cultures—both her own and those of others—through food.
Learn more about Cook Like Your Ancestors at www.mariah-rose.com.
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