Gramma’s Soap

I gave myself the gift of new experience yesterday, when I made my first batch of bar soap. I call it “Gramma’s” because it is the type of soap she might have made a century ago. My mother, born in 1922, was so darn happy have “store-bought,

"Curing" Lard/Lye Soap

instead of that horrible lye soap” her mother made. What she didn’t realize is that all bar soap has lye as an ingredient. It’s the only way to make fats “saponify” and harden into bars.

I imagine that Gramma didn’t have a digital scale to weigh her ingredients. I imagine she made her lye direct from hardwood ashes like all the generations before her. I imagine she spent hours rendering lard and tallow. I imagine there may have been times when every bit of lye did NOT saponify and accidentally irritated tender skin. I tried the new soap and it was not only was non-irritating, but actually skin-softening.

I did it!

Now that I have my basic soap, I can make some hand-milled herbal bars. I will also make it into dish soap and shampoo. It won’t be long before all of the toxic petro-chemicals are absent from this household.