Nourished Magazine :: Wisdom to thrive by

Basic Method

taken from Hulda Clarke’s book, “The Cure for All Diseases,”

You’ll need:

• A small plastic dishpan, about 10″ x 12″
• A glass or enamel 2-quart saucepan (not metal)
• 1 can of lye (sodium hydroxide), 2 ounce or 300g
• 3 pounds of lard (1 1/3 kg)
• Plastic gloves (use eye-protection too
• Water

Take some time when you don’t have children around, this recipe requires much or your attention and it is dangerous.

Method:

1. Pour 3 cups of very cold water (refrigerate water overnight first) into the saucepan.
2. Slowly and carefully add the lye, a little bit at a time, stirring it with the a wooden or plastic utensil. (Use plastic gloves for this; test them for holes first.) Do not breathe the vapor or lean over the container or have children nearby. Above all DO NOT USE METAL. The mixture will get very hot. Our ancestors used a sassafras branch was used to stir, imparting a fragrance and insect deterrent for mosquitoes, lice, fleas and ticks.
3. Let cool at least one hour in a safe place. Meanwhile, the unwrapped lard should be warming up to room temperature in the plastic dishpan.
4. Slowly and carefully, pour the lye solution into the dishpan with the lard. The lard will melt. Mix thoroughly, at least 15 minutes, until it looks like thick pudding.
5. Let it set until the next morning, then cut it into bars. It will get harder after a few days. Then package.

If you wish to make soap based on olive oil, use about 1 1/3 kg. It may need to harden for a week.

Liquid soap

Make chips from your home-made soap cake. Add enough hot water to dissolve. Add citric acid to balance the pH (7 to 8). If you do not, this soap may be too harsh for your skin.

Traditional Method without Lye Solution

Saponification is the rather complex but easy to create soap making reaction when a fatty acid meets an alkali. When fats or oils, which contain fatty acids are mixed with a strong alkali, the alkali first splits the fats or oils into their two major parts fatty acids and glycerin. After this splitting of the fats or oils, the sodium or potassium part of the alkali joins with the fatty acid part of the fat or oils.

Soap Making Takes Three Basic Steps:

1. Making of the wood ash lye.
2. Rendering or cleaning the fats.
3. Mixing the fats and lye solution together and boiling the mixture to make the soap.

First Let’s Make The Lye

In making soap the first ingredient required is a liquid solution of potash commonly called lye.

The lye solution was obtained by placing wood ashes in a bottomless barrel set on a stone slab with a groove and a lip carved in it. The stone in turn rested on a pile of rocks. To prevent the ashes from getting in the solution a layer of straw and small sticks was placed in the barrel then the ashes were put on top. The lye was produced by slowly pouring water over the ashes until a brownish liquid oozed out the bottom of the barrel. This solution of potash lye was collected by allowing it to flow into the groove around the stone slab and drip down into a clay vessel at the lip of the groove.

Some colonists used an ash hopper for the making of lye instead of the barrel method. The ash hopper, was kept in a shed to protect the ashes from being leached unintentionally by a rain fall. Ashes were added periodically and water was poured over at intervals to insure a continuous supply of lye. The lye dripped into a collecting vessel located beneath the hopper.

Preparing the Fats

The preparation of the fats or grease to be used in forming the soap is the next step. This consists of cleaning the fats and grease of all other impurities contained in them.

The cleaning of fats is called rendering and is the smelliest part of the soap making operation. Animal fat, when removed from the animals during butchering, must be rendered before soap of any satisfactory quality can be made from it. This rendering removes all meat tissues that still remain in the fat sections. Fat obtained from cattle is called tallow while fat obtained from pigs is called lard.

If soap is being made from grease saved from cooking fires, it is also rendered to remove all impurities that have collected in it. The waste cooking grease being saved over a period of time without the benefits of refrigeration usually become rancid, so this cleaning step is very important to make the grease sweeter. It will result in a better smelling soap. The soap made from rancid fats or grease will work just as well as soap made from sweet and clean fats but not be as pleasant to have around and use.

To render, fats and waste cooking grease are placed in a large kettle and an equal amount of water is added. Then the kettle is placed over the open fire outdoors. A Bar B Que will do. Soap making is an outside activity. The smell from rendering the fats is too strong to wish in anyone’s house. The mixture of fats and water are boiled until all the fats have melted. After a longer period of boiling to insure completion of melting the fats, the fire is stopped and into the kettle is placed another amount of water about equal to the first amount of water. The solution is allowed to cool down and left over night. By the next day the fats have solidified and floated to the top forming a layer of clean fat. All the impurities being not as light as the fat remain in water underneath the fat.

Making the Soap

In another large kettle or pot the fat is placed with the amount of lye solution determined to be the correct amount. This is easier said than done. We will discuss it more later. Then this pot is placed over a fire again outdoors and boiled. This mixture is boiled until the soap is formed. This is determined when the mixture boils up into a thick frothy mass, and a small amount placed on the tongue causes no noticeable “bite”. This boiling process could take up to six to eight hours depending on the amount of the mixture and the strength of the lye.

Soft and Hard Soap

Soap made with wood ash lye does not make a hard soap but only a soft soap. When the fire is put out and the soap mixture allowed to cool, the next day reveals a brown jelly like substance that feels slippery to the touch, makes foam when mixed with water, and cleans. This is the soft soap the colonists had done all their hard work to produce. The soft soap is then poured into a wooden barrel and ladled out with a wooden dipper when needed.

To make hard soap, common salt is thrown in at the end of the boiling. If this is done a hard cake of soap forms in a layer at the top of the pot. As common salt may be expensive and hard to get, it is not usually wasted to make hard soap. Common salt was more valuable to give to the livestock and the preserving of foods. Soft soap works just as well as hard and for these reasons the colonists, making their own soap, did not make hard soap bars.

In towns and cities where there were soap makers making soap for sale, the soap could be converted to the hard soap by the addition of salt. As hard bars it will be easier to store and transport. Hard bars produced by the soap maker were often scented with oils such as lavender, wintergreen, or caraway and were sold as toilet soap to persons living in the cities or towns.

Hard soap was not cut into small bars and wrapped as has been familiar. Soap made by the soap makers was poured into large wooden frames and removed when cooled and hard.

The amount of soap a customer wants can be cut from the large bar. Soap is sold usually by the pound. Small wrapped bars were not available until the middle of the 19th century.

Difficulties in Making Soap

The hardest part is in determining if the lye is of the correct strength, as we have said. In order to learn this, the soap maker floats either a potato or an egg in the lye. If the object floats with a specified amount of its surface above the lye solution, the lye is declared fit for soap making. Most of the colonists felt that lye of the correct strength would float a potato or an egg with an area the size of a modern quarter above the surface. To make a weak lye stronger, the solution can either be boiled down more or the lye solution can be poured through a new batch of ashes. To make a solution weaker, water is added.

About the Author...

Joanne Hay, Editor of Nourished Magazine, Chief Nourisher and Mother of three is very grateful to live in Byron Bay and be able to share all she has learned about Nourishment. She has trained as an Acupuncturist (unfinished), Kinesiologist (finished) and parent (never finished). She serves the Weston A Price Foundation as a chapter leader. She loves sauerkraut, kangaroo tail stew, home made ice cream, her husband Wes and her kids Isaiah, Brynn and Ronin (in no particular order…well maybe ice cream first).