Persuasive Essay Topics on making your soap the hard way.
By Norman Morrison                      

Persuasive Essay Topics of Today and Yesterday: Making Soap Isn't Pretty!

Soaps come in all forms these days. You got your bar soap, your soap on a rope, your liquid body soap, and your perfumed head soap. Even the astronauts have soap in toothpaste tubes. They just squirt a little out and lather up right up there in space. Soap is such a common place item that you can purchase at any grocery store, Kwik Rip, or asteroid filling station that nobody stops to consider where they would get it if the Russians exploded a cosmic ray bomb, knocking out all the cash registers at all the grocery stores, thus forcing them to close and never sell soap again. Sound impossible? Does the word Tungaska bring anything to mind? Even today, natives of that doomed land don't have access to soap.

Along about October 1914 there came a story in the now defunct Home and Farm Magazine about making soap down on the farm. To modern folks, this sounds like a lot of useless work and a crudity at best, but in those long gone days when folks were walking, talking, and generally being animated and not horizontal, it was a fact of life. Folks on the farm had snow ice cream in the winter and watermelon in the summer, and if they needed something to wash their hands with, you can bet they turned to mama, the soap maker, for there was no grocery store or kwik rip handy in those days.

If it wasn't on the shelf, or out in the yard or barn, you made do without. This meant that you had to dredge your hands in sand or clean dirt to wash off the remnants of your pizza. You wiped your mouth with yesterday's news...and that's where we begin. Let's look in on the farm folks in 1916. Be vewy quiet and they won't know we're peeking...

Dateline 1914- Washington Family Makes Sufficient Soap at Butchering Time to Last for Year and Only Toilet Soap Is Purchased!

THOSE Who are inclined to the belief that soap-making on the farm is a long and arduous process should read the narration of one Washington family, which has found that at butchering time soap becomes a by-product.

In olden days and not so very olden, say in the time of our grandparents, soap-making was drudgery. The necessary lye had to be leached from ashes. The whole thing was a tedious process. Nowadays, with the ever-ready box of commercial potash, it is much easier than many other necessary tasks on the farm.

Soap should always be one of the by-products of the butchering season. And when butchering is carried on, the unnecessary buying of soap is one of the leaks in household management, and, it might be said, no inconsiderable leak. Of course, in rush seasons it will often be found more economical to buy soap than to make it, taking into consideration the time lost in making soap.

In one family of three persons on a Washington farm, no soap is bought except for toilet use. But two hogs are killed each Fall, averaging about 200 pounds apiece. Yet this family never runs out of good, hard, homemade soap, and usually has a supply well ahead. Meat rinds are not thrown to the chickens, dogs and cats. It is a great mistake to think that soap can only be made from clear grease. A large crock is kept into which are dropped all rind, trimmings of hams and shoulders, even lard cracklings, and to this are added any surplus meat fryings or fat of any kind, which
should, however, be free from sediment or lean meat bits of any kind. The weight of this material has the same value for soap-making as an equal weight of clear grease.

There are no hard and fast rules for making soap. One gains knowledge and skill by experience in this as in other things, but with ordinary judgment and common sense there is little danger of failure. To each five pounds of grease fellow one box of potash and a gallon of soft water. Put the water in a large iron kettle, out-of doors, and add the lye. Stir with a stick until dissolved, then add the grease and boll until all scraps are eaten up.

Keep the fire low in order to prevent the pot's boiling over and add a little cold water from time to time to keep the contents down; also stir often. As soon as the mixture has boiled about two hours and the scraps are all dissolved add another gallon of water for each box of lye used and boll until it looks "soapy," then add a handful of two of salt, which will cause the soap and water to separate, and boll until the mixture strings off the stick. Take out a little in a dish and cool. If when perfectly cool the soap is solid, with the lye distinctly separated at the bottom of the dish, it is done.

When done remove from the fire and turn into a tub or jars or let stand in the kettle to harden for 24 hours. Then cut into blocks, using a long butcher knife and fork so that the new soap will not come into contact with the hands. There will be a quantity of jellied lye under the soap, and it should all be carefully scraped off. The soap should be placed on boards or on heavy paper in the attic or some other out-of-the-way place, where it will not freeze, to cure and harden.

Here at Persuasive Essay Topics of Today and Yesterday we're mostly pleased to bring you the great news about household soaps including the ever popular green soap. Folks from 1916 have mostly gone underground, but once they were clean and sweet smelling. Never let it be said that only modern walking around folks love their soap. Waste not, want not, said one famous soap man. Let that be a lesson to you!

Persuasive Essay Topics of Today and Yesterday is written by the dynamic team of Norm and Vicky Morrison, miners of great stories from the past for the world of tomorrow. Their latest works include a poignant website about the common Napoleon Direct Vent Gas Fireplace.

. It's a tear jerker and should not be missed! This is on the heels of their world famous and award winning Dog Flea Treatment web page.