Laundress: Making Soap

Jump to Navigation

Soap recipes often start with three simple ingredients: water, fat, and lye. On the frontier commodities that were readily available elsewhere had to be manufactured on site, and lye was no exception. Luckily, lye is relatively easy to produce using only water, wood ash, and easy to construct equipment

Making Lye

The first step in the process is constructing an ash drip or ash hopper to extract lye from the wood ash. Lye is well known for being caustic, so this hopper would be constructed out of a material like wood. Built in a v shape, the interior of the hopper would be filled with alternating layers of ash and straw. A ceramic or glass jug would be placed at the bottom to collect the lye-infused run-off and water would be poured over the top of the hopper.

 

Ash Hopper

Making the Soap

When making soap a general rule of thumb was to use two pounds of grease, or beef/mutton tallow for every gallon of lye-infused water. These would be mixed together in a kettle and boiled for 45 minutes until thickened. If a harder or softer soap was desired, the boiling time could be adjusted.

 

As the soap cools flavorings such as peppermint oil could be added. Once the soap reached a desired consistency it could be poured into a wooden mold and left to harden for up to a week before being sliced into bars.

 

 

Experience more Life on the Frontier

Back to Virtual Resource Center Home

 

Overview | Program Outline | Tools of the Trade | Regulations | Historical Background | Doing Laundry | Making Soap | Washboards | Laundry Prices