Dry Christmas cake

Glycerine has a lot of uses around the home apart from moistening a dry Christmas cake. The Household Encyclopedia recommends it for removing coffee, tobacco, fruit, mustard, ink, lipstick, and mercurochrome stains. The CWI Cookery Book includes it in this recipe for non-greasy face lotion:

Four tablespoons of elderflower water, 1/2 teaspoon of benzoin (drop by drop, stirring all the time), 5 drops of glycerine, 5 drops of tincture of myrrh.

Benzoin, it turns out, is both a resin and an essential oil produced by a kind of fir tree, and an organic compound that Wikipedia says has “a light camphor-like odor”. Hopefully, if you’re making the face lotion, you know which one to use.