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." She quotes Elizabeth Wallace's introduction as saying that it gives modern readers reason to appreciate having a refrigerator and a global food system that brings us out-of-season produce. Yet, she observes, the English housewife had many varieties of vegetables, 30 kinds of seafood and 35 kinds of poultry (including hares and rabbits). She notes that the book also describes home remedies, the housewife having to function as " chef, doctor, pharmacist, exterminator, chemist, laundress, and all-around handy-woman." 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.