Ever wonder what folks used to polish their furniture a century or two ago? I found a recipe for Magic Furniture Polish in an 1877 book, Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping.

Start with a cup of alcohol, which is the only ingredient on this list that I keep at my home.

Add one half ounce of resin. (The gum or sap of some trees, such as pine, produces a yellow or brown substance called resin. It is used in medicine and varnishes.)

Next, a half-ounce of gum-shellac is added. (Shellac is purified lac used in varnishes, inks, and paints. Old phonograph records—78 rpm—contained shellac.)

A few drops of aniline brown are then added to the mixture. I’d never heard of this. According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, aniline is a poisonous oily liquid obtained by reducing nitrobenzene.

Let this mixture stand overnight.

The next day, add the final 2 ingredients—12 ounces of raw linseed oil and 1 cup spirits of turpentine. Linseed oil is yellowish drying oil obtained from flaxseed. It’s used in ink, paint, and varnish. Used as a solvent, spirits of turpentine—also called turpentine and oil of turpentine—is distilled resin from trees.

Shake the mixture well before applying with cotton flannel. Rub dry with a different cloth.

My furniture polish doesn’t list ingredients so I don’t know if these have changed over the years. Kind of fun to find out how folks lived a century or two ago.

-Sandra Merville Hart

Sources

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

“Aniline,” Merriam Webster, 2018/12/26 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aniline.

Compiled from Original Recipes. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, Applewood Books, 1877.

“Linseed Oil,” Merriam Webster, 2018/12/26 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/linseed%20oil.

“Resin,” Merriam Webster, 2018/12/26 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resin.

“Turpentine,” Wikipedia, 2018/12/26 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpentine.