A Generous Helping of Home Cooking, for 4 or 104

"Entertaining is bred in the bone down there," she says. "People say I give good parties, but they're nothing compared to parties in Louisiana."

Marguerite, the youngest of five children, was 7 when her mother was killed in a house fire. She and her sister -- the only girls -- went to live with their Aunt Kay, "a fabulous Creole cook."

Every Sunday she watched her aunt put together meals of peppers stuffed with shrimp, veal with olives, bread puddings and two cakes: chocolate devil's food and white almond, both with pecans between the layers and on top.

Aunt Kay did not teach Marguerite or her older sister, Virginia, how to cook, but they knew food was important. "It's the glue that holds families together," Marguerite says. "Tom Kelly says my family is always talking about meals they have eaten, meals they're currently eating or meals they plan to eat."

When she was 17, Marguerite got a job at the New Orleans Item as a copy girl, and on her first day at the paper, she noticed a dashing 26-year-old reporter. "Who is that man?" she asked a co-worker. "I'm going to marry him." And she did. But not for three years. "Tom Kelly wouldn't marry a teenager," she says.

Marguerite hand-wrote the invitations and got four cases of French champagne, four cases of good bourbon "and a wedding cake so tiny my cousin ordered another layer." Aunt Kay made the oyster patties.

The newlyweds started entertaining right away. They had a case of champagne left from the wedding, so they gave a series of champagne breakfasts in their French Quarter apartment.

However, Marguerite still didn't know how to cook. "I didn't even know how to make coffee," she says. For the first six months of their marriage, only Tom cooked. She says they had spaghetti with olive oil and anchovies one night and spaghetti with butter and garlic the next night. In desperation, she picked up "The Picayune's Creole Cookbook" and started working her way through it. She still has the cookbook.

In 1953, the Kellys moved to Washington and rented two rooms from Tom's parents in their house on Constitution Avenue, the house where Tom was born. The parties continued in those two rooms: dinner parties for 12, a Mardi Gras party for 100.

They stayed in that house after Tom's mother died, and in 1971 moved up the street to the house where they raised their four children and live today.

"It's a great house for parties," Marguerite says. "Some people live to eat, and others eat to live. I always thought you made money so you could have a party."

I walked in once 10 years ago when Marguerite was preparing for Virginia's 75th birthday party. One of her young helpers was making garlic bread, using the small pitcher of garlic butter always available in the Kelly kitchen. She basted the bread, then cut the slices with scissors as Marguerite had taught her. In the basement were 30 pounds of crawfish, five pounds of shrimp, two dozen crabs and two containers of gumbo, all ordered from New Orleans.

Just before the guests arrived, Marguerite fried chicken for the children she thought might not eat seafood. The night before, a "small" family group of 30 had Marguerite's jambalaya for dinner.

"I can't imagine a life where I didn't entertain," Marguerite says. "How else can you tell people that you love them?"

Bonny Wolf can be reached atfood@washpost.com.Her Kitchen Stories column appears monthly.