Making Soap
Art Lives On In One Kitchen
By Anne Stevens
Times Food Columnist
Centre Daily Times
January 9, 1983
Among the kitchen arts is that of providing for household cleanliness easily accomplished with a vast array of cleansing products lining long aisles in every grocery store and supermarket. These products are highly specialized and developed for specific tasks: abrasive cleanser for sinks and countertops: detergents that pull our dirt with enzymes added to change it chemically, liquid dishwashing detergents to preserve the hands; powdered dishwashing powders for machine-washing pot and streak-free; floor and wall solutions clinic and pine-scented; "pure" soap, facial-complexion-maintaining soaps with oils and herbs mixed in, all-over body soaps laced with deodorants and perfumes. What these high-tech, sneeze-precipitating, eye-tearing solutions dissipate to is simple, ordinary soap.
It is the plain soap, used for centuries, that colonial American women saved their surplus cooking gats for and it is rarely mad in the home today. Except in the Bellefonte home of Dorothy and LaRue Lutz. Mrs. Lutz has been making soap for the past 40 years the same way her mother and mother-in-law made it.
Her soap is the basic combination of fats and alkali (commonly called lye). It is not the skin-sparing soap used for bathing, but a good utilitarian cleanser suitable for many household-cleansing tasks.
The basic combination, as legend tells, is as old as the hills the hill of Rome that is. The oils and fats from sacrificial animals mixed with the alkaline wood ashes that remained after the fire and formed a slithery coating that ran down the slopes of Sapo Hill and onto the banks of the Tiber River. At that point clothes-washers discovered that the mixture, when rubbed into wet clothes, removed soil and dirt with much less than the ordinary amount of scrubbing.
Of course there are other legends: A Gallie warrior combined wood ashes with goat oil for a magnificent hair pomade. The dandy's head was covered with a blossoming mass of bubbles when he was caught outside in a rainstorm.
Until the discovery of soap, bodies and vessels were cleansed with olive oil, earth or plant ashes and more abrasive cleansers such as pumice, sand or bran.
Industrial soapmaking processes provide each person in this country with more than 50 pounds of soap annually. Highly developed technology produces the shampoos, bars, powders, flakes and fluids that we call soap. And although many chemicals such as perfumes, deodorants, antiseptics, surfactants and enzymes are added, all soaps and detergents have the common ability of making water wetter, making it more penetrating by relieving the high surface tension of ordinary water which can be seen when water alone beads or runs off grease or dirt soil. Soap surrounds dirt or grease particles and holds them suspended or foams them up into the suds and away from the surface being cleaned.
The range of intensity of cleaning is also vast from heavy-duty industrial cleanser to the blandest of baby shampoos.
Somewhere in that range lies the household lye soap of Dorothy Lutz. Her soap is made from the lard left from last year's butchering too strong and rancid for cooking but never to be wasted. The process is simple: mixing lye, animal fat and water together. The result, when set and hard, is a translucent creamy mass any sculptor would be delighted to take a knife to and justifiably expect marbeline results.
But for utilitarian purposes, the soap is poured into a pan, allowed to cool and set, and then cut into bars, much more practical for lathering into a sudsy froth in a dishpan or pail of water, for washing dishes, hand laundering, general cleansing, heavy-duty hand cleansing.
Mrs. Lutz says she has heard that some people use the soap for bathing. Lye soap is a palliative for the distressing ooze and itch of poison ivy, too.
As simple as the process appears, making soap is not child's play nor should it be done with the curious and helpful young. Lye is a caustic chemical and extremely dangerous. Dorothy Lutz works with it deftly but there are precautions she observes.
Lye is available in household cleaning sections alongside drain openers and cleansers; in fact, it is used for those purposes also.
Recipe for Homemade Soap
12 ounces lye
6 pounds lard or fat
2 ½ pints cold water
Fats can be obtained by saving tallow from household cooking. Strain and purify by boiling with an equal amount of water. Remove from heat and chill by adding one quart cold water for each gallon of liquid. Cold congealed fat is skimmed from the surface; six pounds are needed to produce nine pounds of soap.
Mrs. Lutz explains her method of soap preparation:
It is best to add the lye to the 2 ½ pints of cold water very slowly, stirring to dissolve. Dorothy Lutz uses a gallon crock to mix the solution and does the mixing outside on a porch so there is plenty of air to dissipate the fumes created when the lye is added to water. The lard is melted in a large enamel dishpan on her kitchen stove and when it has cooled (there is a chart on the back of the lye can which instructs the proper temperature for the type of fat) it is taken outside and the lye and water solution steadily poured in a thin stream into the liquid fat in the dishpan while stirring, steadily and slowly. Continue the slow and steady stirring until the mixture is thick and the stirring spoon is able to stand on its own. A wooden spoon is best.
The creamy white, clean-scented soap is allowed to set for two days and then is cut into bars and removed from the dishpan. The bars are separated and allowed to dry for several weeks before use.
