my great grandmother's soap recipe

[MzMolly65]

I found this while cleaning out boxes of old photos ..

My Great Grandmother lived in St. Hippolyte, Saskatchewan, Canada and this is translated from French. The year was 1909

"We had a 3 year old sow and she raised quite a few litters of pigs. When we butchered her she was dressed at 830 pounds. We made a lot of soap as she was not much good for anything else. We had over 200 pigs at times.

Here is my soap recipe.

3 pounds of fat
1 can lye
3 tablespoons of Borax
1 quart ammonia
Mix all together, cook in a cast iron pot. Boil until the fat comes on top. Set a day or so to dry and cut into squares."

I wonder how big a can of lye was and whether this soap was for laundry, skin or everything. I suspect everything since I doubt they would have the money or the time to make different soaps for different jobs.

 

[McSpin]

That's pretty neat.

The amount of lye is important, but so is the concentration. It would be easy enough to enter this in soap calc and reproduce it with your current lye source.

 

[Obsidian]

Thats real similar to my grammas soap recipe but she didn't use ammonia. She did CP and it was for bathing, I still have a old bar and its terrible harsh stuff.

 

[Chefmom]

That is pretty cool. What would the ammonia be used for?? That has me stumped.

In my reading...soap was soap back then. It was used for everything around the household. By the 20's commercial producers were pushing their products hard with ad campaigns and way way out there marketing...but homemade soap would have been used for every use around the house.

 

[DeeAnna]

We talked about a very similar recipe awhile back. The discussion in that thread might answer a lot of your questions: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=41965

 

[FlybyStardancer]

Chefmom- ammonia can also saponify oils.It doesn't work as quickly as NaOH/KOH, but it does work. There's been other old recipes posted that use a combination of alkilis to make soap.

 

[doriettefarm]

Chemistry is cool kids! I had no idea about the ammonia but am definitely adding this to my list of experiments.

 

[doriettefarm]

We talked about a very similar recipe awhile back. The discussion in that thread might answer a lot of your questions: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=41965

DeeAnna - thanks so much for detailing the math of sodium hydroxide vs ammonium hydroxide in this link . . . made total sense but gave me flashbacks to actual chemistry class

 

[KristaY]

What a wonderful keepsake! I'd put it in an interesting frame and hang it in my soaping area. I just love those types of historical finds, especially when it's your family. That's so special!