MAKING LYE SOAP

May 18, 2008

Long ago soap making was a family necessity. The soap was called lye soap, and there were three ingredients that went into this soap making process. These were rendered animal fat (lard), lye, and lots of hard work. Early settlers usually made this soap in the fall of the year after butchering their pigs.

First of all the pig fat was rendered into lard and saved either for soap making or for cooking purposes. The lye ingredient was obtained from ashes collected from wood stoves or burning piles. When it came to making the soap, pioneers poured water through the ashes to leach out the lye. This was usually done in a large container (hollow log or wooden barrel) mounted over a grooved lye stone which siphoned off the liquid lye into a clay vessel at the lip of the groove. The third ingredient for the lye soap procedure was supplied by a pair of hard-working hands.

There was truly an art to making this soap. First the lard and lye were mixed together in a large kettle outside over an open fire and stirred for hours and hours with a long-handled paddle. The hardest part was determining if the lye was of the correct strength. Since lye is an extremely caustic substance, the soap maker had to be careful to have just the right concoction of lard and lye. Too much lye would cause the soap to burn the skin; and too little lye would keep the soap solution from hardening.

There were several old methods for determining the proper strength of lye in the recipe. One method was to float an egg or potato into the mixture until only its tip was showing. Another held that if a chicken feather dissolved in the mix, the batch was fit. If the lye portion appeared to be too weak, they’d boil it down; if it was too strong, water was added to the mixture. When the stirring paddle was able to stick straight up in the soap mix, it was said to be done. The lye soap was then poured into metal pans and allowed to dry and harden. The hardening would take from two weeks to one month. After the lye soap hardened, it was cut into smaller bars for everyday use.

Since this whole soap-making process took such a very long time, the lye soap was carefully stored away until the next soap-making time. This was usually a whole year distant. Pioneers used their lye soap for all types of family cleanliness; everything from cleaning their faces to doing the laundry.