Adventures in Traditional Soap-Making
A Brief History of Traditional Soap-Making
Pannikin of soft-soap on chair at left
“Then Almanzo was left alone in the kitchen, to take his bath. His clean underwear was hanging on a chair-back to air and warm. The wash-cloth and towel and the small wooden pannikin of soft-soap were on another chain. He brought another washtub from the woodshed and put it on the floor in front of the open oven-door.
He took off his waist and one pair of socks and his pants. Then he dipped some warm water from the tub on the stove into the tub on the floor. He took off his other pair of socks and his underwear, and his bare skin felt good in the heat from the oven. He toasted in the heat, and he thought he might just put on his clean underwear and not take a bath at all. But Mother would look, when he went in the dining-room.
So he stepped in the water. It covered his feet. With his fingers he dug some of the brown, slimy soft-soap from the pannikin and smeared it on the washcloth. Then he scrubbed himself well all over.”
— Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Chapter 7 Saturday Night)
That “soft-soap” is what we are after. I’ve called it “man soap,” or “kick ass soap.” The traditional methods of making soft-soap go back literally thousands of years. The basic process involves leaching ashes in water to produce “lye-water,” and then mixing the lye-water with a fat, or fats, usually over heat, to “saponify” the fats. In Almanzo’s case the soft-soap would probably have been made from cooking and heating-fire ashes, saved from the previous winter, and left-over fats from cooking. Soap-making was springtime work, and it was work, without question, and usually the responsibility of the woman of the house. In a perfect world, the resulting product contains neither fat nor lye, but only soap, the two ingredients having been totally consumed in the saponification process. I’ve called it “man soap,” or “kick ass soap.” It’s real, it’s natural, it was traditionally made from waste products, and it does the job. And, the devil is indeed in the details; more on that to come in this post. Read more
