TLDR: For most of the history of wooden cutting boards, the standard advice was to scour it and dry it, not to oil it.
When I first became excited about "oil-free" cutting boards, it was mostly practical:
No oil meant avoiding petroleum products and potentially rancid food oils, and it was inspired by the research showing that untreated wood is the most resistant to bacteria.
But after looking through many historical sources for mentions of cutting boards, something else stood out to me:
Oiling your cutting board is a very recent (20th century) idea.
For most of the time people have used wooden boards, nobody was telling them to oil the wood.
The standard guidance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was to scour (abrasive cleaning, often with sand or salt), and then dry the wood well.
A board was considered clean and in good shape when the wood was “dry and white.”
Today most people think the opposite: that wooden cutting boards that appear dry and light in color are thirsty for oil.
Many of the more famous sources that I looked at from the time, such as the 1000+ page long Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, do not mention cutting board care at all.
Here are a few selections of what people did say at the time.
These are from English-language sources up to 1950:
1882: Household Economy, Kitchen-Garden Association (US)
"Wooden ware should be washed with cold water and sand." (the wooden ware just listed: "rolling-pin, chopping-tray, bread-board, potato-masher")
1899: Australian Town and Country Journal, "To Clean a Pastry Board"
"…sprinkle it with fine white sand, and scrub with a stiff brush along the grain of the wood, not across… wash the sand off with much cold water, and set the board up in the air to dry, but not in the sun."
1907: This advice was circulated widely in different Australian newspapers
"Wooden spoons and chopping boards should be well scrubbed with sand or bath-brick instead of soap. This treatment will render the wood both white and smooth."
1909: Birmingham Age-Herald (US)
"Scrubbing the Bread Board — Coarse salt is better to use in scrubbing a bread board than soap."
1912: Harrington, Choice and Care of Utensils, Cornell (US)
"Fine sand is better than soap for scrubbing wood"
1950: Livingstone, Food Service (US)
"How to clean wood top tables and work boards.
1. Clean off food particles.
2. Sprinkle with scouring powder.
3. Wet a deck brush with warm water and scrub the top with the grain of the wood… Rinse with clear warm water and dry."
There's some other interesting patterns in here (people didn't like soap for wood), but generally the advice is always quite simple:
scour, wash, and dry, with no mentions of oil for upkeep.
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I'm going to leave it there for now, because tracing how oiling actually did appear is a much more tangled story.
But the simple takeaway is this: oiling wasn't standard advice, even into the 1950s.
The same books often do mention oil + wood (they describe oiling furniture and banisters), and these were people who kept their tools for life.
Yet nothing about oil on cutting boards: the idea doesn't seem to have existed yet.
So where did the advice actually come from?
To be continued.
Sources:
Note: My search here was limited to publicly available books and newspaper archives, which is also why Australia is somewhat overrepresented here. They have a great government newspaper archive called Trove.
Beeton, Isabella. The Book of Household Management. London: S. O. Beeton, 1861. (Covers kitchen woodenware under general scouring; contains no cutting-board care instruction.) HathiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015000556202
Household Economy: A Manual for Use in Schools. Published under the direction of the Kitchen-Garden Association. New York: Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & Co., 1882, p. 3. HathiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t0ms4742g&seq=17
"Useful Recipes" [incl. "To Clean a Pastry Board"]. Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney, NSW), 18 February 1899, p. 41. Trove (National Library of Australia): https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/71324118
"Chats with the Cook" / "Household Hints" [household-hints column, run across Australian newspapers, 1907]. Earliest instance: The Sunday Sun (Sydney, NSW), 17 March 1907, p. 6; quoted wording as printed in The Colonist (Maryborough, Qld.), 7 September 1907, p. 36. Trove search (≈53 reprints, 1907–1929): https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/category/newspapers?keyword=%22chopping%20boards%20should%20be%20well%20scrubbed%22
"About the House" [incl. "Scrubbing the Bread Board"]. The Birmingham Age-Herald (Birmingham, Ala.), 10 January 1909, p. 36. Library of Congress, Chronicling America: https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn85038485/1909-01-10/ed-1/?sp=36&st=text
Harrington, Ida S. Choice and Care of Utensils. Cornell Reading-Courses. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1912, p. 38. HathiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b51089&seq=24
Livingstone, Helen. Food Service; for Restaurant, Coffee Shop, Hotel, Cafeteria, Home. Bloomington, Ill.: McKnight & McKnight, 1950, p. 87. HathiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=uiug.30112101480538&seq=95