I wasn't sure where to put this one. Didn't quite fit into the "Emergency Preparations" sub-forum, nor "Medical Needs and First Aid," nor "Homesteading and Self Reliant Living," nor "Transportation," nor "Gardening and Agriculture," etc, etc, etc.
But I want to try and assemble a master list of all those very old-school products that mom and granny and even great-grandma each had in the
kitchen pantry, the
bathroom medicine cabinet, the
hallway cleaning closet, the
basement laundry room, the
garden potting shed, and even on the
garage workbench. These products from yester-year tended to be very shelf-stable, and could (usually!) be safely combined with other products. Even more advantageous was that they were all just so darned common to almost all American households that speaking with family, friends and neighbors about these products needed no explanation or conversational footnotes.
I am not saying modern products are inferior. I am instead hoping to recapture forgotten knowledge of the most basic household products from days gone by. Knowledge of these products --what they were and how they worked-- can, I believe, help us of today to better navigate the correct applications for the more modern, new-fangled products being pushed on us by advertisers. I see those old school products as the "baseline of understanding" for how ALL household chemicals should be applied. Getting a handle on this foundational baseline is key to being wise and judicious in our usage of the newer products of today, and even the yet-to-be-invented products of tomorrow.
So ... I have six categories. I'm certainly open to more:
PANTRY ... MEDICINE CHEST ... CLEANING CLOSET ... LAUNDRY ROOM ... POTTING SHED ... WORKBENCH Help me out with these categories. And duplicating one product into multiple categories is fine since so many of them had multiple uses.
Here's my own list so far:
PANTRY
- Baking soda
- Vinegar
- Baking powder
- Flour
- Sugar
- Salt
- Pepper
- Worcestershire sauce
- Cooking oil
- Lard
- Butter
- Honey
- Coffee
- Tea
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MEDICINE CHEST
- Epsom salt
- Hydrogen peroxide
- Iodine
- Rubbing alcohol
- Syrup of ipecac
- Ichthammol ointment
- Vaseline (most common brand name for petroleum jelly)
- Listerine (most common and oldest-surviving brand name for an alcohol-based mouth wash/throat gargle)
- Witch hazel
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CLEANING CLOSET
- Bleach
- Spirits of ammonia
- Ajax
- Lemon oil (used as a furniture polish and a glass cleaner)
- Moth balls
- Murphy's Oil Soap
- Old English Scratch Cover (brand name for a wood stain product which hides scratches in wood furniture)
- Pine Sol (brand name for a pine-scented, all-purpose cleaner)
- Bees wax (for polishing furniture)
- Leather soap (saddle soap??)
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LAUNDRY ROOM
- Soap flakes
- Bleach
- Starch (for ironing)
- Kerosene (a good stain lifter, but keep it away from the dryer!)
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POTTING SHED
- (I have no clue, but I figured this needed to be separate from the "Workbench" category)
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WORKBENCH
- 3-in-One Oil (brand name for a multi-use machine oil)
- Kerosene
- Turpentine
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