By: staniel
[2003-03-04]
Soap
it's made with pigs
When I was a guest at Annna and Matie's place, I received a bag of Ben's
homemade soap. Sadly, I forgot to pack it along with the Frog joke book and other things I acquired in Oregon, and returned home soapless. I am sure there was a conversation when it was discovered, along the lines of:
Matie: Thanks to your friend, the soap has now followed us here from Medford. Soon it will be OUR closet with fifty pounds of dusty tallow spilling out into the hallway. What have you done?!
Annna: Okay, put the machete down and get me a mailing label.
The bag originally contained a bar of Lava soap as well, I guess so that I could compare the two. The Truwes are proud of their soap-making. However, by the time it reached me, the Lava had either been removed or the homemade soap had killed and eaten it.
I had actually requested the soap, having known of its existence beforehand. I usually wait until I've worn a cake of Ivory soap down to a thin wafer in the bath, and start using it for hand soap when it is threatening to break in half, or immediately after it has done so. One of Ivory's faults is its brittleness. In addition to the breakage, I also have to worry about disgusting furrows developing, as the soap cracks and the cracks fill with hand-dirt and, eventually, mildew. I didn't want to switch to another brand, since other brands tend to have scents added. So, homemade soap!
Upon receiving the package, I promptly installed the largest bar in the soap dish, and I'm duly impressed. The bar has yet to diminish noticably in size, though the corners and edges have become rounded. I firmly believe that this one pound will last me through college, and I've only got nine credits so far. It's really good soap, too. It makes my hands smell a little tallowy, which I actually kind of enjoy, and it seems to be moisturizing my hands. It at least lacks the dehydrating properties of store soap. The only weird thing is the fact that there's barely any lather, but I can live with that.
Soap!
One of my sister's daughters makes glycerin soap and sells rabbits. The glycerin melt&pour soap is easy to make, and you can put stuff in it, like dried flowers and Cracker Jack prizes. There's a spiffy online soap recipe generator that allows for using a wide variety of fats and oils, and you could probably make some soap that would froth for hours. One of the weird possible ingredients is beef hoof fat. But there are many other possible oils like mink oil.
Soap Recipe Writer
Emu oil soap sounds sort of exotic, and there are so many deer here that I'm sure that there's lots of venison fat. Almond oil would be nice, too. I'm not muched versed on the difference between sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide. I think that traditional local soap was ashes and renderings. Maybe Pop will speak on this.
Is there anything as satisfying to hold as a new, whole bar of soap? Heavy, dense, compact and clean in edges and surface. It does not crumble or slouch on first holding it. That it is singular and perfect in purpose is irrelevant; it's the aesthetic solidity that matters; a bar of soap is confidently and resolutely there.
I think of the scene in Ramona Quimby, Age Eight in which Mr. Quimby, places a new Pink Pearl eraser in his daughter's hand on her first day of school.
I think of the time I put a new bar of soap in a sock and clocked Tyrone up side the head.
There is a great satisfaction which comes with unwrapping a new bar of soap. Also, remember that one part in that one Ramona book where she puts the "NOSMO KING" sign in her dad's cigarettes?
That was great.
On the link, it said 100% sheep tallow and lye. Pig fat would have been common here, or beef tallow, because there haven't been many sheep until lately with the flocks of Merino sheep. Lanolin is a good traditional soap base. I like that one Ramona book where she take a new bar of soap and puts it in a sock and clocks Tyrone up side the head.
I read a fair number of those Beverly Cleary books when I was a kid, and they ran together with the Judy Blume books which, along with novelizations of Disney live-action movies (the one about the robot dog and the one that is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court except the yankee is an astronaut are the most memorable) formed the bulk of my hand-me-down reading matter as a kid.
The original caption for this article was "it's made with sheep". Annna's editing took the form of pigs. And the urine picture. Perhaps the soapmaker will favor us with a clarification.
that I mistrust Annna's call on this; she did help render the stuff, after all.
I guess I should weigh in here; I made the soap. As the text on the first link ("homemade soap") says, soap is reacted fat and lye. Any kind of fat (sheep, beef, pig, whatever), any kind of lye (sodium hydroxide, potassium hydroxide). Getting the two to react can be a bit tricky, and the recipe has to be altered for the different characteristics of the different fats.
If anyone is interested in my instructions for backyard soap (real he-man open-fire render-the-dead-pig soap, none of this stovetop drugstore glycerine soapmaking crap), just ask. My instructions tell you how to avoid the little twenty-foot pillar of fire problem.
You can render your own fats; just save up anything with fat in it--roadkill, bacon drippings, doesn't matter what. And it doesn't matter how rancid it gets while you're saving it up; rendering it (heating in boiling water and skimming off the ick) gets rid of all the odor and you'll end up with sweet, lovely soap.
You can make your own lye, too, though I've never done it. The pioneers would save their hardwood ashes in a barrel, and percolate water through it. Strain and boil down whatever's left until it floats an egg, then good luck finding a recipe for how much to use.
And don't expect your soap to lather. Detergent lathers; soap just makes curds. And you will eventually get disgusting black furrows and cracks in the bar. Dunno what's in there making them black, but I know it's clean!
My grandma made some soap once and sent it to us. it lasted a really long time, but mostly cause we didn't like to use it. I'm not sure if she messed up or that just how it works but it smelled like bacon and lye (which is alright I guess cause that what I think she made it out of) but it also left your hands burnning and greasy.
I guess that specific gravity would be why the egg would float, and while one could probably measure the alkalinity with a pH meter, I think that I'd just wing it. The health people have been warning people off sassafras tea because it has naturally occuring Red Dye #2 in it, as do red apples, but I still dig up some sassafras roots to make my Spring Tonic Blood Thinner. Only once a year a couple of quarts of sassafras tea, if it kills me, I'll die happy. I like the smell of sassafras a lot, it spreads through the woods here with runner roots, and it's easy to dig up a couple of pounds of the roots. There are buckets full of ashes this time of year from fireplaces and woodstoves. Besides the local hunters, I'm buddies with the local butcher who's a Teamster from West Virginia, he'd think making sassafras soap would be quite normal, especially since he didn't blink after my telling him about groundhog stew. He might have some soap recipes hisself. I might ought to make some soap, it's getting to be time for my annual bath.
Yeah, with enough soap Pop could wash just about anything.
Yeah, fat and lye is what soap is supposed to smell like (as opposed to modern "soaps," which are detergents). But if it's burny and greasy, then there's unreacted fat and lye in there. Granny screwed up.
I was figuring that you could probably get appropriate litmus paper to determine when soap is "cooked" and went looking for pH soap, but they sure have a lot of listings for the band,
10pH Soap
