A Short History of Soap and a Recipe, Involving World War II, Proctor and Gamble, Joske's Department Store, and My Grandmother

Homemade Soap, Ready to Cut

When my mother was a child, during the peak of WWII rationing, my grandmother made their soap in their backyard in San Antonio. For that, Grandmother needed lots of cheap, or better yet, free, fat so she sent my mom and her sisters to the butcher to get pails of  rancid lard. Then she rendered and cleaned the lard in a huge pot. 


Soap is easy to make but lye is nothing to be haphazard with. All the usual cautions apply: Wear safety gear. I arm up like a 16th century samurai: long sleeves, long pants, closed shoes, hair back, elbow length heavy rubber gloves (make sure they're well-fitted so hands will be nimble!). I even wear a mask while I'm pouring the lye. I've never read any directions that require a mask, but I always wonder if breathing lye powder or fumes is all that good an idea. Also, keep vinegar handy, to neutralize lye just in case an accident occurs. Finally, keep children and pets well-away while making soap.

I've always loved this story because it so perfectly encapsulated who my grandmother was:

1) She loved free. Rancid fat? Free? I'll take it, is what my grandmother would have said.

2) She was a fanatic about cleaning. She worked as a maid through my mom's childhood, (for the Joske family, of Joske's Department Store at one time) but that didn't stop her from coming home in the evenings and scrubbing every damn thing she could find. 

3) Grandmother liked to keep kids busy. For most of my childhood, she ran a summer work camp for grandkids that involved, among other things, scrubbing the tile grout between the stove and the wall with a tooth brush.

So I guess I'm not surprised that WWII rationing did not slow her love affair with soap down a single little bit.

My mother never made soap when I was growing up. She did not render fat or build a fire in our backyard. She was done with all that by the time she was raising kids and she never romanticized poverty or hard work. Also, there was no rationing going on. 

I come from unknown generations of hardscrabble, dirt poor, food insecure people on both sides of my family. I don't romanticize poverty either, at all. I know it's anxiety-producing and crushing and hard in ways large and small. And though in my adulthood, I've escaped that kind of poverty, something makes me run my fingers through these stories, again and again. And something in me finds comfort in reproducing these hardscrabble recipes.

My own soap making does not involved rendering rancid fat. I most often use the cheap, largely inedible fat of our time: hydrogenated vegetable shortening. This is an historically appropriate choice, because German chemist, Edwin Cuno Kayser, invented what came to be called Crisco, as a substitute for the animal fats traditionally used in soap making while he was working with Proctor and Gamble. I've used other, very fine oils for soap -- olive, avocado, coconut, apricot seed, and so on -- but hydrogenated vegetable oil makes a beautiful, gentle all purpose soap.

By the way, this is a huge recipe. It's easily enough to last a year, and give some away too.

The basic ingredients are

(2) 3 LB cans vegetable shortening

12 oz lye

24 oz water

Follow basic soap making methods:

1) melt vegetable shortening in non-reactive pot (I use stainless steel.)

2) add lye to water, in non-reactive container (I use a pyrex bowl with pour spout.) This bears repeating:; don't add the lye to the water; don't add the water to the lye. You will make a big, big mess if you do it the wrong way around. So measure out the water, then measure out the lye in a separate container. Then, add the lye to the water, being careful not to splash.

3) when fats and water are about the same temp (between 95-100 degrees F), pour the lye water slowly, in a thin, steady stream into the fat. 

4) stir, stir, stir, in gentle figure 8 pattern, until soap traces, using non-reactive spoon or immersion blender. This recipe traces quickly, especially if you use an immersion blender, so have the mold ready to go.

5) pour into molds, wrap in towels to retain heat. I use a large plastic shoe box. Sometimes I remember to line it with wax paper for easier unmolding. You want the soap to cool slowly, so store it in a reasonably warm place, if you can. I store mine in my laundry room.

6) when soap has hardened (24-48 hours), remove from mold and cut into bars

8) cure for 2 weeks or so before using (I use a cake stand, to take up less space and allow for air flow.) A longer cure means a harder, longer-lasting bar.

These are very broad stroke directions. If you've never made soap before, you'll want to read up first. A great book for novices is The Complete Soapmaker, by Norma Coney. 

That said, I've never had a single mishap with lye or soap. Not even a minor burn or scratch. Which is not something I can say about any other cooking or household task. Maybe it's the National Emergency level of safety cautions I take for lye -- as opposed to the haphazard approach I take to most parts of life.

Speaking of haphazard, this soap is so foolproof that I sometimes measure by volume instead of by weight. Don't do that! Seriously, don't. Every book on soap making says you absolutely cannot measure by volume, or gigantic disasters will occur. And it's no big deal to just use a scale and measure by weight. I have a postal scale I use. It was inexpensive, and is a generally handy device, which has paid for its purchase many times over. So there's never, ever any reason to measure by volume.

Still, sometimes I do it, as I did this time. I don't know why. Just some kind of contrarian impulse. The worst thing that's ever happened is once my soap came out a bit soft. But still, listen to the experts and never, never measure by volume.

Watermelon Rind Pickles

I once took my dad to Pioneer Farms in Austin. We stood on front of a 19th century settlers cabin. It had one room, a dirt floor, fireplace, cedar post walls chinked with mud. A few implements hung from the walls -- a coiled rope, an ax, metal things I could not identify. There was a table, two short split wood benches, and a bed smaller than my five year old's twin bed.

My dad said, "I grew up in cabins a lot like that, you know."

I looked at him in astonishment. He had 6 brothers and sisters. I tried to picture them all lving in that one room.

"It wasn't that nice of course."

Ba-Doom-Doom!

That was the thing about my dad. His childhood in rural Louisiana was so unbelievably hard-scrabble that his stories often sounded like the lead-in to a joke. But though he was never self-pitying, he wasn't joking either. His childhood was one of almost unremitting hunger, punctuated by fits of violence from his angry, alcoholic father.

He didn't have electricity until he was fifteen. He never saw a dentist until he join the Air Force. A rural nurse visited twice a year to give the kids in his family deworming treatments.

His parents were truck croppers, something hardly anyone I've told this story to has ever heard of. It was, believe it or not, a step below share croppers.

"Share croppers had a better deal than we did," said my dad.

Ba-Doom-Doom!

Truck croppers worked a farmer's field in return for a portion of the harvest. They loaded their portion into their trucks and sold it at small markets. Then they moved on. I once saw a list made by my dad's sister of all the places they had lived - three or five or eight in one year. It's no wonder that my dad worked so hard to hang on to our little dirt farm in the Texas Hill Country. After his childhood, he was determined to never move again.

In addition to working the farmer's field, my grandmother planted a kitchen garden wherever they lived and usually just managed a harvest a single crop before they had to move on. Dad told me she always canned furiously, trying to preserve every last little thing before they had to leave a house.  After she was finished canning the good stuff, whole figs, tomatoes, blackberry jam, she liked to pickle and make jellies of scraps of this and that. Her specialties included corncob and peach peel jelly and watermelon rind pickles, The family survived mostly on boiled greens and cornbread with dripping, so this monotonous diet was enlivened by my grandmother's pickles and jellies.

Every once in a while, I like to make a batch of watermelon rind pickles and think of my grandmother, loading and unloading her few small possessions into the family truck, she and my grandfather and all six children. I don't know what they owned. Maybe a bed or two, a table, a few chairs, a dresser, a box of mementos, some bundles of clothing. I imagine her packing her jars of preserves carefully, wedging them between the clothes, maybe. And I imagine her hoping the jars arrive unbroken to the next house where she will plant her next garden.

My recipe for watermelon pickles is pretty standard, gleaned from the 1972 Frederickburg Community Cookbook that I for from my mom. I just do three things differently. First, I add peppercorns to the pickling syrup because I like a little heat to go with the sweet. I also often add a handful of additional pickling spice and a myrtle leaf to each pickling jar. It's not strictly necessary and I don't always do it, but I think it intensifies the flavor a bit.

Watermelon Rind Pickles

4 lbs watermelon rind
1/2 c picking salt
2 1/2 c white vinegar
3 lbs sugar
20 cloves
20 peppercorns
10 small sticks of cinnamon

Optional:
More pickling spices and myrtle leaves.

Salt the rind:
Cut watermelon in 3/4 inch slices, removing all of the pink flesh and outer skin. Sprinkle with pickling salt and toss. Sore in refrigerator overnight.

Prepare the pickles:

Rinse salted rinds twice. Bring vinegar, sugar, cloves, peppercorns, and cinnamon to a boil in a large saucepan, stirring until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add rinds and return the mixture to a boil.
Reduce to a low boil and cook until the rind in translucent, about 20 minutes.

Add optional spices and myrtle leaves to canning jars. Fill canning jars with rinds and canning syrup. Process in hot water bath for five minutes, following standard canning procedures.

How To Cook A Live Goose: Aspiration, Pain, and Pleasure in an Eighteenth Century Recipe

Nobody really wants to torture animals anymore. We want our eggs free-range, our meat grass-fed, and our milk cruelty-free. We’re pretty much over cockfights and bull baiting. And our make-up better not be tested on animals.

Certainly, some people are indifferent to the living conditions of the animals they eat. And many can’t afford anything except for factory-farmed food. Agri-business and food processors try increase or protect their profits though often cruel practices. But for the most part, we don’t seek to torture animals these days.

That wasn’t always the case, though.

If you love reading old cookbooks (and who doesn’t) you might have come across the idea that eighteenth century folks thought that meat was healthier and tastier if animals suffered right before dying. Cooks and good huswives were instructed to beat an animal to death with a large cudgel, or to skin it alive, or in one spectacularly extreme recipe, to cook it while it was still alive.

In The Cooke’s Oracle, Dr. William Kirchiner related the following recipe:

Take a GOOSE or a DUCK, or some such lively creature, (but a goose is best of all for this purpose,) pull off all her feathers, only the head and neck must be spared: then make a fire round about her, not too close to her, that the smoke do not choke her, and that the fire may not burn her too soon; nor too far off, that she may not escape free: within the circle of the fire let there be set small cups and pots full of water, wherein salt and honey are mingled: and let there be set also chargers full of sodden apples, cut into small pieces in the dish. The goose must be all larded, and basted over with butter, to make her the more fit to be eaten, and may roast the better: put then fire about her, but do not make too much haste, when as you see her begin to roast; for by walking about, and flying here and there, being cooped in by the fire that stops her way out, the unwearied goose is kept in; she will fall to drink the water to quench her thirst and cool her heart, and all her body, and the apple-sauce will make her dung, and cleanse and empty her. And when she roasteth, and consumes inwardly, always wet her head and heart with a wet sponge; and when you see her giddy with running, and begin to stumble, her heart wants moisture, and she is roasted enough. Take her up, set her before your guests, and she will cry as you cut off any part from her, and will be almost eaten up before she be dead; it is mighty pleasant to behold!!

There is so much going on here that it bears paraphrasing:

First, the cook plucks the goose, except for the head and neck, and then covers its bare skin in a thick layer of butter. Then the cook builds a circular fire and places cups of salted honey water (eighteenth century Gatorade!) and applesauce inside it. Next, the still-living goose is placed inside the fire, where the writer claims, the goose will run around, sipping water, eating applesauce, voiding its bowels, until finally, it collapses, exhausted, heart still beating, flesh cooked to perfection. Finally, the cook brings it to the table where it cries, as it is carved and eaten.

The experience will be, the writer says, “pleasant to behold.”

I first came across this account more than ten years ago when I was studying the history of cookery at the University of Texas. I’ve told the story of this poor goose at more cocktail parties than I can count. Each time, the details were sufficiently grotesque to hold the attention of seasoned academics, well plied with booze.

The focus, for academics, was on the way pleasure and pain worked in this account. That is, although supposedly, eighteenth century wisdom would have the meat itself actually be better, tastier, and more healthful if the animal had experienced pain before death, this recipe seems to imply that part of the pleasure came from the diner actually witnessing the animals’ pain.

What I don’t recall any of the academics questioning was whether this account represented an actual practice. And that is worth considering.

So let us imagine an eighteenth century huswife, in the well-equipped kitchen of a large house, attempting to cook a live goose, as instructed by Dr. William Kirchiner.

The first matter was to pluck the live goose and then cover it in butter. Anyone who has ever met a live goose knows that geese are strong, fast, and aggressive. But if the cook were fast and strong, and had an equally fast, strong kitchen assistant, she could have trussed it tightly with some kind of rope and then managed these first steps without more than perhaps a bite and a bruise or two.

I suppose that is possible.

And I suppose it is possible that the cook hopped over the circular fire with the bound, buttered, struggling, slippery goose in her arms, released it from its trusses, and then hopped back out of the fire. With any luck, she did not trip on the dishes of water and applesauce that she had laid out for the goose, or catch her skirts on fire. Fireplaces in the eighteenth century could be huge and rather open, especially in the kitchens of large houses. And the geese were probably smaller, and the people stronger and more inured to pain.

So let’s just say that the cook survived the first part of the recipe without major injury.

The cook then had to hope that the goose, surrounded by fire, plucked, covered in butter, in a state of panic and terror, would pause to sip water and eat applesauce.

It seems unlikely, yet suppose it happened.

Then, we are told, the applesauce should have caused the goose to void its bowels uncontrollably, all the while running about until it exhausts itself and falls down. That event signaled to the cook that the goose’s flesh was cooked.

Quickly, before the gooses heart stopped, the cook had to leap over the fire, lift the bird clear, plate it, take it to the table and carve its flesh so that guests could enjoy its plaintive, last cries while eating its crisp skin.

Try to picture that. The goose’s skin must necessarily be covered in ash from the fire and, not to put to fine a point on it, its own shit. Because there is no way that goose was not stepping in shit and ash while it was running around exhausting itself. And there was no way that anyone could clean off the bird’s skin without hosing it down.

Do we suppose that the guests then ate this shit and ash covered bird all the while delighting in its cries of pain?

No. It’s hard to imagine that anyone, at any time, actually produced this dish. It seems not just impossible, but impossibly weird.

And that’s the thing about other peoples’ food. It’s weird. By weird, I don’t mean objectively weird but relatively weird. What other people eat is weird relative to what you (or I) eat.

And that’s one thing that makes cookbooks so fascinating. Food and eating are universal but also, deeply specific to time, place, class, and so on.

And here’s something that’s pretty universal to cookbooks and domestic texts. There are often, not to put too fine a point on it, full of shit. Or to put it in another way, cookbooks are often as often aspirational as they are practical. That is, people buy cookbooks for all sorts of reasons besides wanting to know how to cook. They want to see what other, fancier people eat. They collect cookbooks, as objects to be displayed. They use them to daydream about that big dinner party they might someday give and definitely impress all their friends.

And it is likely that this recipe was just that: an aspirational recipe that a good huswife could mull over, imagining that someday she could really, really impress her friends.