This year’s £3000 Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism goes to Felicity James’s reflection on 20 years of sharing her kitchen with the self-styled domestic goddess
• Runner-up: Björk’s Utopia album by Rennie McDougall[br]• Runner-up: Debi Cornwall’s Welcome to Camp America exhibition by Zack HatfieldThe mouse had clearly been dead a while. It was entombed in the entertaining section,its grey bootlace tail – it was a field mouse – bookmarking a picture of a party meatloaf. It wasn’t clear whether it had crawled into my mother’s grand Housekeeping to die, or whether the assorted canapes had crushed the life out of it. Either way, and there would be no more devilled eggs.
And even worse,the whole cupboard of cookery books was doomed. Mrs Beeton’s intricate dinner party menus; the lurid (shocking; sensational) 80s cakes of Jane Asher; Delia soundly holding a brown egg. All of them gnawed at and nested in, in the years since my mother had got ill and my father had begun to subsist on beans and Heinz tomato soup. Into the skip with them all.
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Source: guardian.co.uk