Walnut Grove: Watch out for the Lunar Bugbear!: Lye Soap Making 101

My latest tutorial at Old Salem was in making soap with lye leached from fireplace ashes and hog lard. This type of soap was a soft soap for general household use: laundering, cleaning, dishwashing, and even repelling insects in the garden. Though lye soap is great for your skin, I would not label this particular kind as a "beauty bar," unless you want to go on a date smelling like hog lard! Like many historic homemade crafts, soap making is a finicky process, and our particular batch never coagulated properly. I'm guessing the moon was in the wrong phase.

Here is a recipe from Mary Randolph's cookbook,

The Virginia Housewife, published in 1824

To Make Soap:

Put on the fire any quantity of lie you chuse [sic] that is strong enough to bear an egg, to each gallon add three quarters of a pound of clean grease, boil it very fast and stir it frequently; a few hours will suffice to make it good soap. When you find by cooling a little on a plate that it is a a thick jelly and no grease appears, put in salt in the proportion of one pint to three gallons and let it boil a few minutes and pot it in tubs to cool; (should the soap be thick, add a little water to that in the plate, stir it well, and by that means ascertain how much water is necessary for the whole quantity; very strong lie will require water to thicken it after the incorporation is complete; this must be done before the salt is added.) Next day, cut out the soap, melt it, and cool it again; this takes out all the lie, and keeps the soap from shrinking when dried. A strict conformity to these rules will banish the lunar bugbear* which has so long annoyed soap makers. Should cracknels be used, there must be one pound to each gallon. Kitchen grease should be clarified in a quantity of water, or the salt will prevent its incorporating with the lie. Soft soap is made in the same manner only omitting the salt. It may also be made by putting the lie and grease together in exact proportions, and placing it under the influence of a hot sun for eight or ten days, stirring it well four or five times a day.

*I have no idea what a lunar bugbear is, but I don't think I want it crawling around in my soap! (And there's the moon again!)

(Cindy and I made the soft soap (without the salt). Cindy has also had success with the "no-cook" or "sun soap" method described at the end.)