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Soap, The Hard Way

Ilana — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:31:28 +0000

I was at Sturbridge Village last weekend (detecting a theme?) and there happened to be two costumed interpreters making soap, the old way. In an earlier post, I mentioned that the ashes from all those wood fires were saved for making soap. I had a vague idea of the process, but took the opportunity to quiz them. Here is my understanding of the basic process in ten steps (if anyone knows better, please share). As I write this, I wish I’d had a recorder…
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Lye, the corrosive alkaline substance in soap (NaOH), is what lets soap do its job. In 1840, you obtained lye from all those ashes.
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1) Fill your wooden barrel with ashes. This barrel should have holes in the bottom.
2) Set it on your collecting stone (note the grooves in the stone beneath the barrel) and fill it with soft water (rain/stream water) but not so much that the water starts to flow. Leave it there for at least a day.
3) Start adding more water. Slowly. This will leach the lye from the ashes. Collect it by placing a bucket beneath the stone’s spout. Do not touch. Remember, its corrosive. My son reached out and the interpreter jumped to stop him.
4) An egg should float – straight up and down. If it floats like a boat, you need to add more water. If it doesn’t float at all, its too dilute and you need to boil the lye water to concentrate it.
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Meanwhile, you should be preparing your lard (animal fat).
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5) Melt your lard.
6) Heat up your lye water.
7) Mix the two together. I looked online and it looks like a ratio of 2 gallons of lye water mixed with 3 cups of melted lard is the goal.
8. Then you ‘prove’ the soap. This involves fine-tuning the ratio by looking to see how the soap falls when lifted with a knife. It shouldn’t be too long and ropy (needs more lye), nor should it fall in short, white pieces (needs more lard).
9) When the ratio is right, you have soft or liquid soap. If you want a bar of soap, there’s more to do (see step #10).
10) Add salt. This causes the soap to float to the top and a brown liquid to stay on the bottom. You skim off the soap. Once you’ve collected enough (you may have to re-melt it), you pour it into wooden molds and let it cool. Later, you can cut it into bars.
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If you want more details there’s a website called Traditional Soap Making that I consulted. I’d love to try this someday. Just once. I’m sure after one run through I’d be completely content to continue to buy my soap at the store.

Wireless Dog Fences…

Ilana — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:52:13 +0000

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…And Their Consequences

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We have a sweet black lab that we trained to a wireless fence.
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The basic principle behind the thing is that there is an underground wire around your property that is linked to an electrode on a collar they wear. When the dog gets too close, the collar beeps a warning. If the dog tries to cross the wire, it zaps her.
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Nira trained very quickly and the wireless fence was all we’d hoped it would be (except for an occasional broken wire). But then we moved.
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In our current house in Massachusetts, we have a fenced backyard (as in wood, no wire). Nira, however, trained really well.
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Shortly after we moved here, our cell phone service (Verizon) started sending us text messages in the middle of the night (3:30am). Our cell phones would then make a small electronic beep indicating a message awaited us. Poor Nira thought she was going to be zapped. At 3:46, precisely one minute after the first warning beep, she arrived at our bedroom door, quivering, tail between her legs. At 4:00am, the next beep occurred and Nira peed on the floor.
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I went downstairs to figure out what the problem was and made them mistake of letting her outside to calm down. Its 4:15am, cold outside, and the dog won’t come back inside she’s so scared…. Much coffee was consumed the next morning.
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The same events (thankfully without peeing on the rug) occurred over and over. As such, we have no text messaging service.
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Unfortunately, Nira also thinks that the cell phone is out to get her when it signals its battery is low. We’ve told these stories to family members, none of whom believed us, until last night.
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The kids were in bed and my husband and I were sitting in the living room chatting with my visiting in-laws. My cell phone beeps. Low battery. The dog appears from the other room where she was napping. I started to laugh. Watch this, I tell them. Minutes later, my phone sounds its ominous warning again. Nira leaps onto the sofa (she’s well trained and would otherwise not dare) and shoves her way behind me, burying her head and quivering.
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Nira’s a big, black dog (intimidating to those who don’t know them) and it was quite a sight. It was when we were done laughing that my in-laws admitted they hadn’t realized how terrified she really was until they’d seen it for themselves.
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It’s been two years since we left that wireless fence in Savannah, Georgia. Tomorrow, we’re putting a bid on another house in Connecticut. It has a wireless fence for dogs….

Open Hearth Cooking

Ilana — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:14:52 +0000

Wait for Their Return incorporates a lot of historical facts from the 1830s. To get the details as accurate as possible, I spent a huge amount of time reading and researching. The library has seen a lot of me this past year.
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I also made several trips to Sturbridge Village in order to get a feel for the time period (their reconstruction aims to set them in the year 1840).
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In my novel, a lot of attention is focused on an old kitchen and open hearth cooking. To get a better feel for this experience (library research can only take you so far), I spent an evening in Sturbridge Village participating in their open hearth cooking class.
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I peeled vegetables with an old fashioned knife (appreciation for my peeler grew) and measured ingredients in an entirely new manner (I felt like I was just guessing).
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I helped spit the meat, and watched as the interpreter placed it in a ‘tin kitchen’. You can see this tin kitchen in the photo below – it’s the silver half-cylinder facing the fire. This cooking utensil was a huge leap forward in its time as it allowed the cook to use the reflected heat of the fire to evenly roast a chicken or a cut of meat. We had to remember to turn the spit every ten minutes (no timer) and set the wire into the next notch. Before its invention, many a roast was burned on one side and nearly raw on the other (yuck).
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Frying with hot embers on the fireplace hearth is a whole different experience from using the stovetop – not to mention the level at which you work (the floor). Stay close to the fire too long and you overheat, stand too far away and it can grow rather chilly. You have to remember not to grab the cast iron handles bare-handed and grab them you must. Many rest on small tripod legs and are a bit tipsy. One wrong move and your dinner is on the floor in the ashes.
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As the daylight faded, we had to finish preparing the meal by candlelight. I was glad most of the cutting and chopping was done. We were informed that, by 1840 standards, we were working with an excessive number of candles.
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My favorite part was learning how to use the bake oven. The interpreters had arrived hours before us to prepare the oven. It takes between four and five hours of a lively fire to heat the bricks enough to bake bread. You can see the fire burning in the upper right corner. Many people think that the fire is built in the bottom opening with the bread placed in the upper opening. The lower opening is for collecting all the ashes you generate (those are carefully saved for soap making). When the oven was hot enough, we let the fire die out before carefully shoveling out the coals and sweeping out the interior with a wet broom. Our rolls were then inserted and a cast iron door was set in place.
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After a good three hours of work, we set the table, learned some 1840s manners (eat with your knife, not your fork) and enjoyed the results. It was wonderful! The roast was perfect, the fried vegetables were crispy, the rolls and pie perfect. The meal was easily one of the best I’d ever had.
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So, as I eye our fireplace at home and look online to see if you can still buy a ‘tin kitchen’ (you can), my husband grows nervous. Cast iron pans have entered my home and I would love nothing more than to install a crane (the iron arm that pots hang from) inside the firebox.