Your grandmother did not buy a cleaning product for every surface in the house. She had maybe four things under the sink, and the house was clean.

This is not sentiment. It is a fact about the economics of mid-century housekeeping. The average American supermarket in 1965 stocked a fraction of the cleaning products available today. There was no separate spray for the stovetop, the granite, the stainless steel, the glass cooktop, the grout, the toilet tank. There was a box of baking soda, a bottle of white vinegar, a can of Bon Ami or Comet, and a bar of Fels-Naptha. Maybe some ammonia under the sink in a brown bottle with a warning label that everyone ignored.

The products worked. A lot of them still do, better than what replaced them -- or at least as well, for a fraction of the cost. Here are ten that are worth keeping.

1. White Vinegar on Glass

Dilute it half-and-half with water in a spray bottle and use a lint-free cloth. Windows, mirrors, the inside of the microwave door -- all of it. The acid cuts through grease and mineral deposits without leaving a film, which is the thing that makes most commercial glass cleaners disappointing. Commercial glass spray often leaves a fine residue that builds up over months and eventually makes the glass look perpetually fogged. Vinegar doesn't.

The smell is gone in about twenty minutes once the surface dries.

2. Baking Soda as a Scrub

For anything that needs light abrasion without scratching -- the inside of the sink, the bottom of a coffee mug, the tile grout around the tub -- baking soda applied with a damp cloth does the work without leaving marks. It is mildly alkaline, which neutralizes odors at the source rather than covering them. A box costs under a dollar. A box lasts months.

The one thing to know: rinse it well. Baking soda leaves a white dusty residue if you don't get all of it, and that residue will drive you crazy on dark surfaces.

3. Boiling Water on a Drain

Pour a full kettle of just-boiled water slowly down a slow drain. Do it once a week as maintenance and you will almost never deal with a blocked drain. The heat melts grease buildup that accumulates from dish soap, cooking fat, and whatever else goes down there. It costs nothing. It takes thirty seconds. It is not exciting.

Drain cleaning products -- the caustic gel kind -- work faster on a serious clog, it's true. But for maintenance, boiling water is the thing your grandmother did, and she was not wrong.

4. Salt on a Cast Iron Pan

Coarse kosher salt and a paper towel. Work it around in the pan while it's still warm, then wipe out and oil lightly before storing. The salt acts as an abrasive to lift stuck food without stripping the seasoning the way soap does. No water, no steel wool, no scrubbing that takes off years of built-up seasoning.

Cast iron was kept this way for generations. The pans lasted longer than the people who owned them.

5. Hydrogen Peroxide on Stains

Three percent hydrogen peroxide -- the brown bottle from the drugstore, under a dollar -- works on blood stains, wine stains, and most organic material on white fabric. Apply it to the stain before washing, let it sit for ten minutes, then launder as usual. It works by oxidizing the stain rather than just lifting it.

It does two things the spray-bottle enzyme cleaners do at five times the price. It also has a short shelf life once opened, so buy small bottles and use them. The product that's been sitting under your sink for two years has probably stopped working.

6. Ammonia on Oven Racks

This one requires overnight. Put your oven racks in a garbage bag with about a quarter cup of ammonia -- no water, just the ammonia and the fumes. Seal the bag and leave it outside or in the garage overnight. In the morning, the baked-on grease wipes off with a damp cloth. Not loosens -- wipes.

The ammonia fumes do the work. You don't need to soak anything or scrub anything. The fumes break down the carbonized grease at a molecular level, which is why it works when nothing else does. Wear gloves when you open the bag. Don't breathe the fumes directly. Use it outside if possible when you're rinsing. These are not complicated precautions.

7. Lemon Juice and Salt on Copper

Mix lemon juice and table salt into a paste. Apply it to tarnished copper with a soft cloth, rub gently, rinse. The copper comes up bright. The same paste works on brass, on bronze, on the copper bottom of cookware that has gone green.

Every commercial copper polish in the store is running a version of this chemistry. The ingredient list just has more words in it.

8. Newspaper on Wet Glass

Dry your windows with crumpled newspaper after cleaning them. Old-school newspaper -- the broadsheet kind -- leaves no lint and no streaks. The slight ink and the texture of the paper do something that paper towels don't, which is why this trick has survived long after most people stopped taking the paper.

You need actual newspaper for this. Printer paper doesn't work. The glossy ad inserts don't work. The thin broadsheet newsprint is the thing, and if you don't subscribe to a paper, you can still usually find yesterday's edition at the library free box or at the neighbor who still takes the Tribune.

9. Cream of Tartar on White Porcelain

Mix it with just enough water to make a paste. Apply to stains inside a white porcelain sink or tub and let it sit for half an hour, then scrub with a soft brush and rinse. Rust stains, mineral deposits, the yellow ring that develops around the drain -- cream of tartar handles all of it without scratching the porcelain the way abrasive powders can over time.

It is sitting in your spice cabinet right now, probably bought for one recipe and never used again. Use it on the sink.

10. Fels-Naptha on Laundry Stains

A bar of Fels-Naptha has been in production since 1893. You find it in the laundry aisle, usually near the bottom shelf, usually behind everything else. It costs about two dollars. Wet the bar, rub it directly on a stain, let it sit before washing. Grass stains, ring-around-the-collar, grease on cotton -- it handles all of these better than most spray pre-treatments.

It was developed as a laundry soap before commercial detergents existed, and the formula has not substantially changed. The people who know about it, know about it. It has a small and devoted following of people who have used it for thirty years and consider it non-negotiable.

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What Shouldn't Come Back

A few things the old housekeeping manuals recommended that should stay in the past.

Carbon tetrachloride was used as a spot remover through the mid-20th century. It worked extremely well. It is also carcinogenic and toxic enough that the EPA effectively banned its consumer use in the 1970s. If you find an old brown bottle of it in a deceased relative's basement, treat it as hazardous waste.

Chlorine bleach used directly on fabrics, which the older cleaning guides recommended freely, destroys fabric over time and produces toxic fumes when it mixes with ammonia -- a combination that happened more often than anyone admitted because both were kept under the same sink. Bleach has its uses. Direct application to clothing and mixing with other chemicals are not among them.

Lye-based drain cleaners, the kind that were sold in canisters in the 1950s, were effective and genuinely dangerous. Children were burned. Adults were burned. The safety regulations that came later were not bureaucratic overreach. They were a response to actual emergency room visits.

The current crop of cleaning products is safer than what it replaced, better labeled, and more carefully dosed. The old methods worth keeping are the ones that were actually safe. The ones that required you to "ventilate the room well" and "avoid contact with skin" for routine household use are not worth the nostalgia.

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The ten tricks above require things you probably already own or can buy for a dollar or two: white vinegar, baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, kosher salt, a bar of old soap. None of them require a trip to a specialty store. None of them require reading a label that takes four minutes to parse. They work on chemistry that hasn't changed since your grandmother's house, because the dirt hasn't changed either.

What old-fashioned cleaning trick do you still swear by? Is there something your mother or grandmother did that you haven't found a modern replacement for? Tell us in the comments -- we'd love to hear.