About the Book
The Modernistic Recipe-Menu Book of the DeBoth Homemakers' Cooking School was published in Chicago in 1929 by Jessie Marie DeBoth, A.B., director of the Homemakers' Schools of Chicago and New York and formerly a home economics specialist for Michigan Agricultural College. DeBoth ran travelling cooking schools — a newspaper would sponsor a week of demonstrations in a local theatre, and thousands of women would come — and this is the book she sold to the women who came.
“Modernistic” was the American trade word for what we now call Art Deco, and the book means it in both senses. Its first chapter says outright that it will skip the technical matter because you would not read it, and gets on with the menus; it talks about calories, vitamins and the balanced diet as the ordinary business of a homemaker; it assumes an electric refrigerator, a thermostatic oven set in degrees, and a “Company Shelf” of tinned and bottled things kept against unexpected guests.
What is here, and what is not — please read this. This site carries the book's recipes: some nine hundred of them, in the order and under the chapter headings the printed contents give. It does not carry the book's menus. The transcription this edition was built from is a recipe transcription, and not one bill of fare survived into it — no seven weeks' menus, no Sunday dinners as menus, no bridge or Thanksgiving bills. For a book called a recipe-menu book that is a real absence, and it is not disguised here.
Three printed chapters are missing from the transcription as well, and so from this site: Weights — Measures — Temperatures (page 9), and the book's last two chapters, Reducing Menus (page 282) and Constipation Diet (page 290) — the transcription stops at the end of Diet for Under-Nourished Adults. The opening essay on page 7 is absent too. Every other chapter is here in full, including the whole of Beverages and Extra-Special Company Cakes and Cookies.
Nothing has been substituted for the missing matter and nothing has been rewritten. The chapter and part names come from the book's own printed contents leaf; the chapter and part numbers the keyers copied into the running text have been lifted out, because this site's own sections carry them.
Any note in a boxed panel dated 2026 is an addition by this edition's editors, not part of the book.