On Race Day, They're Off and Eating

Kitchen Stories

In 1992, tenants of a house on Fifth Street SE looked out the window at the mint growing in their back yard and decided to throw a Kentucky Derby party. The instigators have moved away, but the May revel has gone on uninterrupted. When the Victorian house was sold and turned back into a single-family home in 1999, the party conveyed.

These days, 60 to 70 people spill into the yard next door through the "Derby gate" the new owners put in the fence they built. The hosts make the mint juleps, other longtime participants provide ham and biscuits, and everybody contributes to the potluck, watches the race on TVs indoors and out and, of course, bets.

Lynn McDonald, 54, who lived at the Fifth Street house when the idea was hatched, has moved a few blocks away but is still invited. Now, she says, there are so many Derby parties in town that she has invited friends who have to party hop.

Derby parties are as much a rite of spring as the first pitch on Opening Day. And you don't have to be from Louisville to have a Kentucky Derby party. I can't even pronounce Louisville, and I welcome the first Saturday in May with mint juleps.

The Derby, the first jewel in horse racing's Triple Crown, is the classic, often called the most exciting two minutes in sports.

What Mardi Gras is to New Orleans the Derby is to Louisville: weeks of parties, parades, balloon races and other debauchery leading up to the run for the roses. Much of the merrymaking revolves around the mint julep, a mixture of mint, sugar and Kentucky bourbon and the official drink of the Derby for more than a century.

"The drink symbolizes the charm of the Old South, when life was less strenuous than it is today -- when brave men and beautiful women loved and laughed and danced the hours away," wrote the late Eudora Welty, according to John T. Edge in his book "A Gracious Plenty." The many brave men and beautiful women who don't live on plantations of bluegrass are no less susceptible to the lure and romance of the drink and the day.

For what to serve with the juleps, though, I wanted to check with someone who might actually know. So I talked to Jennifer Ahearn, 27, a Louisvillian who moved to the Washington area last fall to work for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. She has gone through a lot to become something of a Derby party expert.

She never actually went to the Derby until she went back home during college. But when she was growing up, schools were closed on Derby Day, and her family and their friends had parties that she says were mostly about drinking mint juleps and grilling in the back yard.

As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Ahearn tried to have Derby parties, but it was a tough sell because the first Saturday in May comes around exam time. "It was hard to find people who wanted to take off and drink in the middle of the day," she says. (Parents, take note: This does not appear to be a party school.)

She also found that a lot of her classmates balked at the idea of drinking bourbon. To a Kentuckian, that's hard to swallow.

Things were easier when she had her own apartment while attending Duke University law school, and she began adding more typical Louisville food to the parties because it reminded her of home.