By Bonny Wolf
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 22, 2007; F01

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.

"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.