Soap

Candelyn:  Did you help make soap?  Did Grandpa use lye?  Or make it from ashes?

We always cooked the soap outside in a large iron pot similar to this picture.

Most of the soap looked like this and became more shriveled up over time.  We kept is stored in a flour sack until we used it.  I was assigned to cut chips of it off into a basin and then my mother would put these in a pan with water to dissolve.  The pan was placed on the back of the stove.  Since we heated with a wood stove, my mother also made bread on the same day as laundry day in order to not waste fuel.  I still remember the yummy smell of baking bread mixed in with the horrible smell of the dissolving lye soap.

Sometimes my father used some especially good grease to make some white soap.  I am sure that we never used any home made soap for bathing.  When I was a teenager there was a popular song about "washing my ears with grandma's lye soap" so I guess some people did make soap for bathing purposes.  We only used it for laundry.  We continued to make it during the summers even after we moved to the city.  This was unusual in those days.  None of my friends or relatives still made soap.  I think my parents were using it as a teaching tool as well as saving money.  I do remember the first detergent that came out was called "Dreft" and it came in a green box.  We had Ivory soap, but I only remember using it for carving animals for an art project.  We had Sweatheart soap that was an oval bar just like they still sell.  I think there was a green bar of soap called Palmolive which  I just realized must have been made from palm oil and olive oil.   We also had Lux soap flakes and this was using for washing silk and other delicate things by hand.  I can't remember what we used for dish washing soap.  No one had invented liquid detergent, yet.


I also remember that before we started making our own soap, we used "Pingee" bar soap for laundry soap.  Imagine my surprise when one day when I unwrapped a bar of "Pingee'' soap and noticed that the label said "P &G" for Proctor and Gamble.  From then on Pingee became P and G.
I still laugh about this mistake whenever I hear something about Proctor and Gamble in the news.


We saved all grease from frying foods in a can on the back of the counter.  We saved extra bacon grease there, too.  When we butchered a pig, the fat was rendered into lard which was stored in one quart cans recycled from syrup or previously purchased lard. Actually we called the pans that we baked bread in, "drippers." I never knew why until we butchered a pig and had to rend the lard.  We used the drippers to put the large chunks of fat in to render the lard out in the oven.My mother made pies and cooked with lard.  The final not so great bits of grease we added to the soap can.


Eventually every last bit of left over fat was collected over the year and in the summers we made the fat into soap.  We did not make our own lye but bought it in cans from the store.  My father was the one making the soap.  The kids had to stay far away from the fire and the boiling fat and lye.  I remember he would skim the foam from the top.  I never learned enough about it to be able to make soap from memory and I have never had desire to join the hobby of soap making as an adult.