A Generous Helping of Home Cooking, for 4 or 104

Columnist Marguerite Kelly's dinner party classic: fried chicken. (By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)

The first time I met Marguerite Kelly, I was at a picnic on the lawn of the Capitol and saw a small woman walking up the hill with a huge, cloth-napkin-lined basket of fried chicken. Last month, 20 years later, I sat in the cozy, Provencal-inspired kitchen of her large Capitol Hill home as she oversaw the frying of chicken for the 30 or so guests invited to a Fourth of July pre-wedding party.

I knew the young couple getting married and had offered to make dessert. Marguerite, 75, turned me down. "This whole event was a test," she said later. "I had to see if I could still do it."

For the record, she can.

She did have more help than usual. In the 1980s, she was still hiring most of the neighborhood's 12-year-old girls (boys aren't as good with detail, she says) to help her organize the correspondence for her syndicated family advice column, which runs in The Post's Style section on Fridays. The girls would double as party help. "One time I had four kids in the basement painting gelee on salmon," she says with the drawl and French-ified English that identify her as a New Orleans native.

This year, she hired grown-ups. In addition to that help, various of her grown children and their children, as well as other friends and relatives, were wedged together in the kitchen whipping cream, filling platters and making lemonade -- real lemonade prepared with a simple syrup.

And they were frying chicken. Lots of chicken.

Because Marguerite is from New Orleans, her fried chicken involves Tabasco sauce. Again, the chicken was served in baskets lined with cloth napkins and put out on the large formal dining room table laden with food -- baskets of fresh corn bread, enough salad for a small village, huge bowls of Bing and Rainier cherries, piles of shortcakes, a large glass bowl filled with strawberries and a porcelain casserole dish still bubbling with juicy, sweet Unbaked Blueberry Pie (see recipe online).

Just a typical day at the Kellys'.

Marguerite doesn't think small. "It's easier to give a big party than dinner for 10," she says. "You go to the same amount of trouble." Now, she says, she does more entertaining using what she calls the four-hour rule: "If I feel like having a party, I invite people to come over four hours later."

Some parties, however, still take planning. Weddings, for example, most often can't be planned in four hours. Marguerite and husband Tom Kelly host many family weddings at their rambling Victorian home on the corner of Fifth Street and Constitution Avenue NE. Family is a broadly inclusive word here.

Last New Year's Eve, the granddaughter of a longtime family friend got married. The ceremony and dinner were at the bride's aunt's house on East Capitol Street. Dessert and dancing with a Dixieland band were two blocks up at the Kellys'. As guests stood on the Kellys' porch, waving, the newlyweds were picked up by a white horse and buggy; they trotted off under the moonlight with a light snow falling. Standard Kelly wedding.

Each of Marguerite's three daughters was married at the church around the corner before coming back home with 250 friends and relatives for a blowout party and live New Orleans music. The nuptial spread always included creamed oysters in puff pastry, known as oyster patties. "You must have them at any New Orleans wedding," says Marguerite.