Soap Making In The Bush
(Page 2 of 2)
January/February 1972
By Paul D. Matteoni
Hard soap is made the same way, except that you add a little salt to the mushy mixture as you pour it into the mold. The best proportion we found was two and a half pints salt to five gallons of tallow, and we also discovered that a little powdered rosin added to the grease (just before the lye is mixed in) helps the soap to set more firmly.
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Since lye is used in the backwoods often and for many purposes besides the making of soap, you may find it desirable-as we did-to build your own leaching barrel. To do this, take any large wooden or steel container, cut holes in its bottom and put in a layer of pebbles. Place two or three inches of straw or dried grass on top of the little rocks and then fill the barrel almost full with hardwood ashes from the fire. Tamp the ashes down as you fill the container and leave a small depression in the top.
Support the barrel about three or four feet off the ground and place a sloping trough under the keg to catch and funnel into a bucket the lye that seeps out. When you have the apparatus set up, fill the depression in the barrel with water.
Slowly, that water will seep down through the ashes and—after six to eight hours—a solution of lye will begin to trickle (not run) down the trough. Don't get anxious and try to speed the process by adding more water up above until the depression in the ashes is empty. When it comes to leaching out lye, patience is a decided virtue.
The first run will be strong enough to cut grease, but succeeding runs of lye will have to be poured through your processer twice. The finished solution is finished, though, since the leaching barrel produces the same results you'd get by boiling the wood ashes.
A bit of trial and error taught us that hickory, sugar maple, ash, beech and buckeye are the best producers of lye. Most hardwood ashes will do, though, and with them—plus a bucket of rain water and some left-over cooking fat—you can easily brew up enough soap to clean everybody and everything that needs it . . . and maybe even some that don't.
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