Frozen in time: Maya Angelou cooks for Toni Morrison, September 1994

To honour the author’s Nobel prize for literature, Angelou hosts a feast for 150 in her Winston-Salem home

Maya Angelou stands in the kitchen of her birdcage-lined home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, preparing a feast for a crowd of 150. It is September 1994. She is 66. She stews crowder peas and okra, and grills a sturdy mass of baron of beef to honour two guests: Toni Morrison, who was awarded the Nobel prize for literature the year before, and who died a fortnight ago, and US poet laureate Rita Dove.

The house on Bartram Road would be cleared of its birdcages after Angelou’s death in 2014. After she died, the world honoured her work as a poet, a playwright and a memoirist, paying scant attention to her formidable skills as a cook.