No not the chemical bi-poly-di-hydrogenouns blah blah blah chemical structure. No not the 'go to a craft store and get soap making kit'. I mean as in a recipe on how say the pioneers made soap from the things at home.
The more exacting the better, such as - first slaughter a cow, scrape the fat from (X, Y, Z location) throw into a pot and cook for A amount of time, add D, F, G ingredients, boil and stir for A amount of time, let stand, cool, and pour into mold. Or something along that line.
My research only brings back soap kits and vague references to fat and ashes, or the chemical names and processes that are not clearly defined.
Posts: 4146 | Location: Neither here nor there | Registered: 06-03-02
My Aunt Mary, born 1876 died 1975, made it by saving all grease drippings from cooking and extra fat cut from the carcasses of slaughtered pigs and calves on the farm. These were 'rendered' (melted) then cooled a bit and strained through cotton or cheesecloth (mesh).
Do this until you have about six pounds of tallow saved up.
I don't know how they slaked the ashes in the old, old days.
You'll need a thermometer to measure water and tallow temperatures.
Reheat the tallow to about 130 to 140 F. In the old days it was easy to keep the tallow at that temperature while you prepared the lye mixture. You just put it on the back burner of the wood stove.
Then put 2 1/2 cups of cold water in a big pot.
Very slowly and carefully, stirring with a wooden spoon, add a 12-ounce tin of lye crystals.
Note: lye must be added to water, not water to lye, because a chemical reaction takes place as soon as water and lye combine, and if water is added to lye, the water will superheat and spray caustic steam.
Measure the temperature as you go. It should not exceed 105 degrees F. (The pioneers learned to judge the temperature by hand, just as they learned to test baby's bath water.)
When all lye crystals have dissolved, pour the lye-water mixture into the tallow in a thin stream. Stir very thoroughly with the wooden spoon until it is very homogenous. Be patient.
Then pour into glass baking dishes, and it will settle and harden to be later cut into squares.
They didn't add borax, perfume, titanium oxide (for whiteness) or any other cosmetics. It was great soap -- "grandma's lye soap" -- and whenever my aunt made a batch, she would give some to her married daughters. In return they saved cooking fat for her. They shaved the soap into thin 'curls' and used it in their washing machines. Swore it was way better than chemical detergents for getting whites white.
It has a unique but not at all unpleasant odor.
edited after I found this:
quote:
Making the lye
Drill a lot of holes in the bottom of a small wooden barrel, make sure it's waterproof before you drill the holes!
Stand the barrel on blocks leaving space beneath the barrel for a container. Use a waterproof wood or glass container. Lye can burn through some metals.
Put a layer of gravel in the bottom of the barrel over the holes, then put a layer of straw over the gravel. Fill the rest of the barrel with hardwood ash (NOTE: hardwood -- NOT softwood), leaving a couple of inches at the top clear. Then pour rainwater into the barrel. After a long time the water in the barrel will start to drip into the container. Leave it until it stops, then replace the container with another in case of odd drips.
Use an old iron pot, or a steel pan (One you will not be using for anything else!). Boil the liquid until it is so concentrated that a fresh egg (still in it's shell please!) will float on top. Then destroy the egg. Remember to take all precautions not the let the liquid touch your skin or clothing.
To test the strength of the lye you need a saturated solution of salt. Dissolve chemical-free salt in a pint of water until no more salt will dissolve. Take a stick and put a small weight on the end of it and float it in a pint of the salty water. The weight will sink to the bottom, while the top of the stick will float. Make a mark on the stick where it reaches the water line. Then float the stick and weight in a pint of lye. The mark on the stick will probably be above the water mark of the lye. If so, stir in some more rainwater until the mark on the stick is in exactly the same place it was in the salt water. You now have the correct distillation of lye for making soap.
Soap making uses a caustic solution known as "Lye Water".
When available, Caustic Soda is used. Here we will make Lye Water out of certain wood ashes and "soft water".
I believe you covered everything, including the lye making process.
Now I just need to start saving up lard... ;-)
I especially found the measurements and 'tests' to be very interesting, such as the waterline on a stick trick. Everywhere else I looked wanted you to have a lab to do this.
Again, thanks - many thanks in fact.
Posts: 4146 | Location: Neither here nor there | Registered: 06-03-02
You better hold your nose David. I remember doing this in grade school and the smell was awful. Even the smell of the finished product was disagreeable.
I don't remember lye soap as having a nasty smell. Mind you, I was a kid when I last smelled it, and gross smells don't seem to bother kids! I used to love how the stable smelled in winter, and that air included lots of poo! (before the concrete floors were shoveled clean) as well as hay, straw, and horse and cow breath. Cows have lovely breath.
I would imagine one has to handle the drippings (fat) carefully -- melt it down, not hot enough to scorch it, strain it and store it, covered, in a cool place right away, so it won't pick up odors from any remaining meat bits that are subject to rotting. Might even freeze it after rendering, if you have the freezer-space. Also avoid meat that has been cooked with a lot of spices - e.g. curry powder smells pretty grim when it's stale.
My aunt kept a big jar and put the strained fat into it each time she cooked. She stored it on a shelf in the back porch in winter, and in the stone cellar in summer. The jar was covered to keep the mice from eating the tallow. When the jar was full, she made soap.
Posts: 6961 | Location: British Columbia, Canada | Registered: 06-11-02
My Great Grandmother kept 'lard' - grease mostly used it instead of shortening in cooking, even baking. She strained it and but it in the 'icebox'. It had a creamy white appearance I do not recall a smell to it. I assume this 'lard' is tallow?
Posts: 4146 | Location: Neither here nor there | Registered: 06-03-02
Lard is cooking fat, sold here in blocks.It's white. It comes from all the fat found inside an animal and not otherwise usable.It's used in frying. It may have another name in America: can't think Americans have been living without it
Suet, in cooking, is fat used in pies, puddings and pastry.It comes from the hard, waxy, fat around the kidneys of cattle and sheep, beef suet being the best. When sold it is in a granular form.
Dripping is the fat which 'drips' from meat being cooked and which is allowed to cool.Grandmother's generation would strain it and keep it. It could be used in frying or added to the next joint of meat, to help in the making of gravy if the meat was dry. (Rich people used to do better: they'd have a small joint of meat, separate from the big roast, which was cooked right down just to make gravy!).Dripping is the 'disgusting' stuff that poor people had on bread.
Tallow, used for candles and soap, is (according to Collins Dictionary) "a fatty substance extracted from the suet of sheep and cattle".
Crisco, a popular brand of shortening, was first produced in 1911 by Procter & Gamble and was the first shortening to be made entirely of vegetable oil. As such, Crisco is kosher and may be considered appropriate for vegan diets as it contains no animal products.
When William Procter and James Gamble started the company Procter & Gamble, they hired chemist Edwin C. Kayser and developed the process to hydrogenate cottonseed oil, which ensures the shortening remains solid at normal storage temperatures. The initial purpose was to create a cheaper substance to make candles than the expensive animal fats in use at the time. Electricity began to diminish the candle market, and since the product looked like lard, they began selling it as a food. This product became known as Crisco, with the name deriving from the initial sounds of the expression "crystallized cottonseed oil". -------- Lard
During the 19th century, lard was used in a similar fashion as butter in North America and many European nations. Lard was also held at the same level of popularity as butter in the early 20th century and was widely used as a substitute for butter during World War II. As a readily available by-product of modern pork production, lard had been cheaper and more flavorful than most vegetable oils, and it was common in many people's diet until the industrial revolution made vegetable oils more common and more affordable. Vegetable shortenings were developed in the early 1900s, which made it possible to use vegetable-based fats in baking and in other uses where solid fats were called for.
Toward the late 20th century, lard began to be regarded as less healthy than vegetable oils (such as olive and sunflower oil) because of its high saturated fatty acid and cholesterol content. However, despite its reputation, lard has less saturated fat, more unsaturated fat, and less cholesterol than an equal amount of butter by weight.[2] Unlike many margarines and vegetable shortenings, unhydrogenated lard contains no trans fat. Despite its similar chemical constituency and lower saturated fat content than butter, lard typically incites much consternation and disapproval from many people in the English-speaking world. This may stem from attitudes and the perceived nature of the source animal for lard, or the methods required to obtain the fat from its source.[citation needed] It is also based on the image of lard as a "poverty food".[4]
Many restaurants in the western nations have eliminated the use of lard in their kitchens because of the religious and health-related dietary restrictions of many of their customers. Many industrial bakers substitute beef tallow for lard in order to compensate for the lack of mouthfeel in many baked goods and free their food products from pork-based dietary restrictions.
However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the unique culinary properties of lard became widely recognized by chefs and bakers, leading to a partial rehabilitation of this fat among "foodies". This trend has been partially driven by negative publicity about the trans fat content of the partially hydrogenated vegetable oils in vegetable shortening. Chef and food writer Rick Bayless is a prominent proponent of the virtues of lard for certain types of cooking.[12][13][14][15]
It is also again becoming popular in the United Kingdom among aficionados of traditional British cuisine. This led to a "lard crisis" in early 2006 in which British demand for lard was not met due to demand by Poland and Hungary (who had recently joined the European Union) for fatty cuts of pork that had served as an important source of lard.[16][17]
Thanks DG. Animal fat featured in a lot of the traditional British dishes. A Christmas pudding, for example, should contain suet.Our ancestors ate a lot more animal fat than we do. So would anybody who lived in a British house in Winter.You need all the calories you can get. ('Throw another twig on the fire, Mary !')
I remember asking my mother about one of the kids I played with. I'd seen his mother give him a slice of bread 'buttered' with some white stuff. She explained that a lot of the poor kids, (some were even poorer than us?) had their bread buttered with lard and sprinkled with salt. That was during the depression years in Canada. Even long after the end of WWII, the butter lobby was strong enough to prevent the margarine makers from selling margarine colored yellow. It was necessary to buy the stuff white as snow and mix in the color capsule yourself in order to produce 'imitation butter'.
