Victorian Household Cleaning Tips: Wallpaper and Stale Bread

3435.—To Clean Wall Paper.

If not very dirty, the paper of any room will be much improved by brushing it over in straight lines with a soft broom, covered with a clean, soft cloth; if, however, the paper be much soiled, very stale bread is the best thing to clean it with. Cut a very stale quartern loaf into slices, and, in the lightest manner possible, wipe the paper with it in a downward direction. Clean about a yard at a time, all one way, and be careful to leave no marks. By this process very dirty paper-hangings may be made to look almost like new.

Isabella Beeton, The book of household management (1899) p. 1532 [found on Archive.org]

In our turn-of-the-19th/20th-century Berlin apartment, the whitewash on the wall behind our kitchen sink is no longer especially white. But it turns out that a housekeeping trick printed during the years where it was built is still effective, even if it's meant for wallpaper instead of whitewash.

Taking a plain wheat baguette that has been desiccating for the past month and cutting off a slice — the slice crumbled to pieces, but at least the pieces had flat surfaces — and scraping it over, I did manage to remove much of the accumulated dirt without damaging the paint.

It's a low-waste, environmentally friendly way to clean.

"Artichoke" wallpaper
designed by John Henry Dearle for Morris & Co.
pre-1900
Found on Wikipedia