KLOTZ FAMILY RECIPES: AUNT AVERIL'S BOOK

For my nieces and nephews: Carlie, Allison, Gerard, and Patrick Young; Torey, Robert, and Jeffrey Lambusta with love, Christmas 2001

These recipes come from Aunt Averil's cookbook, which she started keeping in 1916. Aunt Averil was Gramma Moore's older sister and Grace Klotz's aunt. When I printed the recipes in 2001, my grandmother Edith Klotz and I directed our comments to my nieces and nephews, whose ages then ranged from 7 to 16. Those children are now adults, some with their own children; I hope they will forgive me for retaining the tone of the original comments.

I remember Aunt Averil

as our exciting and sophisticated aunt who lived alone in New York city. She seemed very English, partly from spending time in London after the Second World War. But her father was born in England and his older children—Charles, Averil, and Isabelle—were brought up more in the English style than youngest ones—Martha (Gramma Moore), Margaret and Frederick. (Aunt Margaret was the free spirit in the bunch, but that is another several stories!) Averil seems to be the one in the family who kept in touch with everyone, including English and American cousins and family black sheep. (For more on the Jeff's family)

Averil was a professional woman. She began teaching elementary school in New York City in 1917 at P.S. 149 (now Danny Kaye school) in Brooklyn. For much of her adult life she lived with her unmarried aunt, Isabella Boulton who was the principal of another school in New York city. The two women travelled frequently in the summer, sometimes to England to visit cousins, sometimes to Europe, often going out west to visit Averil's sister, Isabelle Barnard, or her sister-in-law Harriet Jeffs, wife of Charles Jeffs who was in the Navy and spent most of his career overseas.

When I was young, Aunt Averil invited me to spend a weekend with her on my own. She took me to the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, which was then quite new and daring. The building was redone in the 1990s but I'll always remember the old one. It was a big cylinder, all open in the middle, with a spiral ramp that went up to the top, about four stories. You walked all the way up, turning around and around the Calder mobile in the middle, and then you walked down again. The paintings were hung on the wall along the ramp, so you saw them twice, once going up and once going down. Aunt Averil also taught me how to tat, and we went to the Cathedral of St. John for a high Episcopalian mass. She gave me a lot to think about when it came to deciding what to do with my life.

This book shows a different, more domestic side. Grammy Grace thinks Aunt Averil started the recipe book when she was engaged to be married. On the book cover, she called herself E. Averil Jeffs. When I knew her, she was Averil Adams, having married and divorced sometime before the 1940 census.

There are a few salads and luncheon dishes in the front, with space to add more main meal recipes. The end of the book was reserved for sweets and desserts. Guess which part is mostly full! Six side dishes, 26 sweets, and no entrées! Perhaps there was a stash of more serious recipes elsewhere. I've rearranged the recipes into categories so you can see the kinds of things Averil liked to cook—or maybe just the kinds of things she needed recipes for, since good cooks carry a lot of their recipes in their heads.

I haven't tested all of the recipes, but I have tried to explain the confusing bits. Great-Grammy [Edith Klotz] helped me with the old-fashioned cooking directions. Grammy Grace [Klotz] explained who was who in the family and I supplemented that with a bit of genealogical research. The women we can't identify were probably friends or fellow teachers.

After I printed these recipes, my mother gave me another box. If she told me who it belonged to, I have forgotten long ago, and so had she when I asked. The people who contributed to the mystery box are pretty clearly from the Jeffs part of the family—most likely Gramma, Aunt Averil, or Aunt Margaret. When I visited her this September, Carol showed me another box with many of the same recipes from the same people. My current guess is that I have Aunt Averil's box and Carol has Gramma Moore's. Since the mystery boxes contain recipes Averil would have known about, I have added some recipes from it that relate to the ones in her book. I have also updated and expanded the comments.

Jill Keen
November, 4, 2024

Questions or comments? Please email me or find me on Facebook .