What the Victorians called “spirit of wine,” and the half-used hand sanitizer that turned out to be the same thing.
For the last few weeks I’ve been working my way through old household manuals and newspaper clippings — English, American, a bit of Australian — copying out recipes, formulas, and “how-tos.” The first thing you learn is that the 1800s spoke a different language for ordinary things. “Sweet oil” is what we’d call olive oil. I started my list with the old name in one column and the modern one in the next, and then had to add a third column, because the English of the 1800s wasn’t even the same English from one country to the next. Paraffin means wax to an American and kerosene to a Brit. Eventually I gave up and started writing down the scientific names too — at which point I began noticing those same scientific names on the labels of things already in my house.
Which is roughly how this experiment started. I was reading through stain-removal formulas that called for “spirit of wine” — an old name for ethanol — when I found a half-used bottle of hand sanitizer shoved to the back of a drawer. Hand sanitizer is mostly ethanol; most run about 60–70%. So I stood there wondering: could I just… use the bottle in the drawer wherever the manual says “spirit of wine”?
On paper, ethanol earns its keep. In the old books it turns up as a window and mirror cleaner, a silver polish, a stain remover, and as an ingredient in wood finish, varnish, shellac, and even a cement for mending china and glass. That’s a genuinely long list for one clear liquid — the sort of thing the store now sells you in fifteen separate bottles.
The catch, and I’d rather flag it than skip it: the spirit of wine in these formulas was distilled from fermented wine or grain — plant, not petroleum. Modern hand sanitizer is not guaranteed to be. Its ethanol may be synthetic (made from petroleum-derived ethylene), and the glycerin that thickens it can be fossil-derived too. So the drawer bottle is the convenient stand-in, not the pure one. If you want to keep this properly make-do and fossil-fuel-free, reach for actual spirit of wine or a fermented (bio-) ethanol. I used the sanitizer because it was already there and already halfway to a landfill — but I’m not going to pretend it’s the same thing that came out of a Victorian still.
That same glycerin, incidentally, is why I ruled a few formulas out before I began. It’s fine — helpful, even — for cleaning. It is not fine in a varnish or a cement, where it keeps the finish from curing properly. So: no shellac experiments today. Cleaning and polishing only.
The formula is old and plain: powdered whiting (chalk) worked into a paste with spirit of wine, rubbed on, then buffed off. Housekeeping in Old Virginia and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing both give versions of it.
What I used: a silver-plated vase (the volunteer), blackboard chalk, hand sanitizer, a mortar and pestle, a small bowl, and a cotton rag.
What I did: ground the chalk to powder in the mortar, stirred in enough sanitizer to make a paste, and worked it over the vase with the rag.
Verdict: it worked, and it worked well. The only nuisance is that the paste dries out quickly, so you’re better off mixing a little at a time and making more as you go than trying to keep a bowlful wet.
This one came from The New Family Receipt-Book (No. 207), a formula for restoring the lustre of tarnished gold and silver lace — the metallic-thread kind — with spirit of wine, warmed before applying. I don’t own any metal lace, so I wondered whether the same warm-alcohol idea might help delicate jewelry, and drafted my mother’s old silver brooch as the test.
What I used: the brooch, two bowls (a small one to hold the brooch under enough sanitizer to cover it, and a larger one to sit the small bowl in), more sanitizer, and a kettle for hot water.
What I did: covered the brooch with sanitizer in the small bowl, set that bowl inside the larger one, and poured hot water around it to warm the alcohol gently — a warm bath, not direct heat, because alcohol and an open flame are a bad pairing.
Verdict: unconvinced. The water was probably too hot; I could smell the ethanol evaporating, which is alcohol leaving rather than working. It did seem to brighten the metal a little, but not enough for me to call the method a success. My guess is it wants a long, covered soak — possibly overnight — and rather more sanitizer to make up for what evaporates. File this one under “promising, not proven.” I’ll come back to it.
The books are full of glass uses for spirit of wine — Buckeye Cookery (1877) says windows “may be kept free from ice and polished by rubbing the glass with a sponge dipped in alcohol,” which is a claim I very much want to put to the test. That’s the honest reason I’m holding the full windows-and-mirrors episode until winter: I want to see whether it actually keeps ice off my car windows, or at least makes the scraping easier, and I can’t fake a frost in this weather. Here’s the first look in the meantime:
None of this is about hand sanitizer being a miracle. It’s about noticing that a thing already in the drawer will quietly do several of the jobs we’ve been sold separate bottles for — and that a 140-year-old book had worked that out long before the drawer, or the bottles, existed. Some of it holds up beautifully. Some of it doesn’t. I’d rather show you both.
If you’ve tried any of these — especially the warm bath, because I’d genuinely like to know what I did wrong — tell me.
— Omi Knows Best
Sources: Housekeeping in Old Virginia; One Thousand Things Worth Knowing; The New Family Receipt-Book, No. 207; Buckeye Cookery (1877). Scans of all four are free to read — see the Sources page.
One useful 19th-century trick in your inbox each week — tested first, source named.
Share your wisdom with me, Omi!