By Bonny Wolf
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

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.

Now working in Washington and living in Annapolis, Ahearn has a recipe repertoire that includes mint juleps, beer cheese, Benedictine (a spread of cucumber, cream cheese and seasonings) and Hot Browns, Louisville's famous hot open-faced sandwiches of turkey, tomatoes, bacon and peppery Mornay sauce.

This year, with the assistance of her fiance, fellow Louisvillian Keegan Mills, she might make Benedictine tea sandwiches and cut the Hot Browns into smaller pieces.

Mills's other big job is smashing bags of ice with a hammer in preparation for mint julep making.

For dessert, Ahearn makes killer bourbon balls, dipped in chocolate and topped with a pecan half.

Ahearn fills her house with red roses, symbolic of the blanket of 554 roses draped over the Derby winner. Some roses will go in the sterling silver Derby cup she got as a college graduation gift. (She says Kentucky couples register for a set of silver Derby cups as a wedding present.) Guests arrive in the mid-afternoon, eat, drink, bet and watch the race, then eat and drink some more. "The Hot Brown," she says, "is a good way to sop up alcohol."

Scott Attman, 30, is planning a race-day party, too, but he is focused on the second jewel of the Triple Crown, run on the third Saturday in May.

He grew up in Baltimore but now lives with his wife and a lot of transplanted Baltimoreans in Bethesda. He has been working for years to build Preakness awareness in his neighborhood.

Attman's party has grown so big that he hired a caterer this year. He chose RSVP Catering of Fairfax because owner Larry Abrams is from a Baltimore family. "He grasped the idea that we wanted to bring Baltimore to Bethesda," Scott says.

Rather than roses, Attman's house will be filled with black-eyed Susans, the Maryland state flower, which also gives its name to the drink on Abrams's menu. The Black-Eyed Susan involves Cointreau, rum, vodka, pineapple juice and orange juice. No offense to Maryland, but make mine a mint julep.

He will serve the drink with crab bisque, crab puffs and Maryland fried chicken that is spiked with Old Bay seasoning and coated in cornmeal. Most authentic of all, for dessert they'll have chocolate snowballs (shaved ice) with vanilla ice cream on the bottom and marshmallow sauce on top, a Baltimore original. Sounds weird, tastes wonderful. It's a bite of Baltimore summertime.

"Everybody has Super Bowl parties," Attman says. "But not many people have plans around the Preakness. It's something different and has come to be something people look forward to."

Maybe by the time he sells his house, the party will convey.

Bonny Wolf, NPR commentator and author of "Talking With My Mouth Full: Crab Cakes, Bundt Cakes and Other Kitchen Stories," can be reached atfood@washpost.com. Her Kitchen Stories column appears the fourth Wednesday of every month.