The title page describes The Compleat Housewife as a collection of several hundred of the most approved receipts, in cookery, pastry, confectionery, preserving, pickles, cakes, creams, jellies, made wines, cordials.

never before made publick in these parts; fit either for private families, or such publick-spirited gentlewomen as would be beneficent to their poor neighbours.The book was the first to publish a recipe for "Katchup"; it included mushrooms, anchovies and horseradish.

She spent her life working as a cook or housekeeper in wealthy households, and unlike Elizabeth Raffald who left service to run her own shop, continued in that profession despite the success of her book.

The subject being both common and universal, needs no argument to introduce it, and being so necessary for the gratification of the appetite, stands in need of no encomiums to allure persons to the practice of it; since there are but a few nowadays who love not good eating and drinkingThe passage was lightly adapted from an earlier book with a similar title, John Nott's The Cooks and Confectioners Dictionary: or, the Accomplish’d Housewife’s Companion (1723), which declared he had added an introduction because fashion had made it as odd for a book to be printed without one as for a man to be seen "in church without a neck cloth or a lady without a hoop-petticoat.

[17] The Compleat Housewife was the first cookery book to be published in America, when William Parks, an ambitious and enterprising printer (originally from Shropshire) printed it in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1742.

[6][18] His version of The Compleat Housewife, a "cookery book of ambitious scope", was based on the fifth London edition of 1732, altered to suit American taste, and without recipes "the ingredients or materials for which are not to be had in this country.

[6][20] Christine Mitchell, reviewing the Chawton House reprint in 2010 for the Jane Austen Society of North America, wrote that Eliza Smith's book "met the growing need for a text to assist women with their task of maintaining a household."

Reflecting that the recipes would "probably never" be used today, and the medicines are useless, the book remains invaluable for researchers, gives readers a glimpse into the world of Jane Austen and her contemporaries, and richly documents eighteenth-century English life.

However, he roundly criticises the 1983 Arlon House facsimile reprint of the 16th edition for deliberately omitting recipes including "To promote Breeding", suggesting this was because the publisher was concerned they might be harmful.

[6] She concludes that The quantities and ingredients render many of the recipes unsuitable to the modern kitchen, but these old cookbooks are increasing in value and interest to libraries, bibliophiles, and collectors, who find in them a truly revealing and fascinating glimpse of the past.