Making Soap from Woodash Lye

The vast majority of soap recipes recorded during the Victorian period make use of commerically prepared lye sources, these had been available since the turn of the century (Leblanc made his discovery of making sodium carbonate from salt in 1791 and further innovation on the same theme was steady from that point onwards), with mined potash coming into use from about 1860 onwards, and most large soapworks took full advantage  of the latest technologial advancements.

Lye made from wood ashes would not therefore have been a regular part of the commercial repertoire, but it is known to still be a common method of producing soap in less urban areas, with examples from American homesteading families being fairly well documented right into living memory.

Although most of my experiments for this project will be using commercially prepared lye, its also good to remind myself just how much work does into making soap from scratch using woodashes as a lye source.
I spent part of this week turning a barrel of ashes into lye and the resulting lye into soft soap. I've written the process up as an article on Downsizer. Making Soap out of Woodash Lye

Shaving Mugs and Bowls

Researching what goes into shaving soap is one thing, but it would be remiss of me not to also have at least a passing look at the containers used to hold soap whilst in use

.

Shaving bowls have a long history. Barbers bowls with a semicircular notch seem to have done double duty in earlier centuries as both bowls for shaving and for use during bloodletting. There is a nice ceramic example here at the Science Museum London dated 1700-1750

And another here, in pewter from the V&A museum dated1675-1700 complete with a little dent to hold a ball of soap. 

By the time we get to the Victorian period and the focus of this project, this style of bowl is becoming rather old fashioned and most men are using a shaving mug to hold their soap. These can take quite a wide variety of forms, from simple containers not dissimilar to the sort of mugs we use today for drinks, to elaborate multi compartmented ones designed to hold a whole or half cake of soap above a reservoir of hot water into which the brush could be dipped.

In barbers’ shops, the use of a communal shaving soap and mug or bowl was frowned on as it could lead to the spread of infections and ‘barbers itch’, so it was possible to have your own personal shaving mug stored at your local barber shop for your exclusive use. Personal shaving mugs, whether for use in the home or by your barber, are now widely collected and a quick look at any of the websites devoted to them will give a good insight into the huge variety of shape and ornamentation found throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

Occasionally patents were filed to suggest improvements in the design of shaving mugs. This one is an American patent from 1867 

US patent 66788 "Improvement in shaving-cups"

The mug below is a shaving mug we found walled up in a disused cupboard when we moved into our 1890s house, I’m not sure of its exact date, but shaving mugs like this go out of general fashion fairly early in the twentieth century. It has ‘A Present from Weston Super-Mere’ on it, and is otherwise a plain, functional, everyday mug. Gareth is currently using it to test some of the soaps I’m making as part of this project.

Although the fancy shaving mug styles are largely restricted to the nineteenth century, the somewhat simpler shape that resembles a modern coffee cup survives- Old Spice for example issued a long line of shaving mugs from 1938 into the 1990s.  

Other shaving soaps, particularly the softer cream soaps made using a combination of sodium and potassium lye, might be packaged in small lidded bowls, a style still to be found in use amongst high end shaving soap manufacturers.

Today, there are a number of excellent artisan potteries creating beautiful shaving mugs, bowls and dishes, some in traditional styles, others in more modern shapes. I must just make mention of Gwynneth Rixon, a ceramicist who will be working with me to develop some shaving mugs that will fit the eventual results of the Victorian Shaving Soap project, her work is wonderful and I am always happy to recommend it.

Victorian Shaving Soap Recipes

There is a huge variation in the methods of manufacture and preferred textures of shaving soaps during the Victorian Period.

Just for starters, have a look at these recipes:

The druggists hand-book of practical receipts of every-day use. By Thomas F. Branston, 1857 recommends an interesting shaving paste that uses eggs

or how about this one?

 The soap called for here is plain Castile, an all olive oil hard soap.

Or this set of recipes for shaving fluid in Cooley's cyclopaedia of practical receipts, by Arnold James Cooley 1864

These types of  formularies also talk about powdered soaps, and creamed soaps such as perle d’amande are also recommended as being popular. Soft soaps made with a potash lye get regular mentions, as in this example from  Acids, alkalies and salts: their manufacture and applications,by Thomas Richardson, 1863

‘The soap, which has become so thick it can hardly be stirred, is run off into frames and cooled. These soaps are generally perfumed but not coloured.’

Although it is made with a potash lye its unlikely to be a jelly like soap, traces of salts in lye sources not as pure as modern commercially prepared KOH will help harden the soap even in small quantities. Many other shaving soap recipes of the period call for a mix of lye sources to get the preferred texture.

A general treatise on the manufacture of soap, theoretical and practical by Hippolyte Dussauce (marvellous name that don’t you think?) writing in 1869 recommends for hard shaving soaps made by the cold process either 2:1 tallow to coconut oil, or about 1:1 in other formulations.

Cold process soap making is incidentally a method regarded by many soapmakers with some suspicion during the Victorian period due to the difficulty in exactly calculating lye to fat ratios in any given batch and the need to start with concentrated lye- it is interesting that it is today the preferred method for artisan soap makers and that we can very easily calculate the exact saponification values of fats to result in a mild soap. 

To our Victorian predecessors, it was usually much better to make a boiled soap starting with a weak lye and adding successively stronger batches then salting out the soap leaving the excess lye and the glycerine behind in the spent lyes underneath. At this point the glycerine was seen largely as a waste product, it is not until the turn of the century that its value in explosives is fully exploited and glycerine becomes often more valuable than the soap itself in commercial soapworks.
 

His recipe for Windsor Soap for Shaving is a good example of the use of both soda and potash lyes (NaOH and KOH to modern soap makers)

Scented with caraway, bergamot, petigrain, cloves lavender and thyme, the soap was sold in cakes of 2-4oz.


Just like today, tastes varied and the Victorian gentleman could choose from a fairly dazzing array of shaving preparations, from hard bar soaps, through cream pastes, powdered soaps, liquids and more exotic emulsions. 

I have barely even started on listing all the scents that were popular, let alone the packaging associated with shaving soaps. Those will have to wait for a separate post all of their own. In the meantime, I have recipes to try out!

Tallow, to use it or not?

I have an interesting dilemma regarding the base fats used in Victorian soap. Whilst they vary a huge amount, a large proportion of the recipes use tallow (rendered and purified animal fat) in the mixture.

Now, there is nothing whatsever wrong with good quality tallow as a soapmaking ingredient in its own right. It gives a firm, pale soap with good lathering properties. Its used in a huge number of commercial soaps today. However, using it means that the soap will be inappropriate for use by any vegetarians, which these days is a lot of people.

Obviously I don't want to put people off using the reconstructed soaps, but I do want to retain as accurate a representation of what soap was like in Victorian times as I possibly can. I'm already going to be making some compromises in ingredients where there are unobtainable or ethically problematic things to work round, and I don't really want to alter so many things that the final product only has the most passing resemblance to the original.


As I see it, I have three possible options:
1. Leave it in where a given recipe, taken across every example I can find of it in the documentary evidence, tends to use it more than lets say 60% of the time. That indicates that the average bar of that soap at the time would have contained tallow, and in the interests of authenticity, it probably ought to be there.
2. If a recipe uses all vegetarian fats even some of the time, leave it out. Make the soap recipe without it and make my vegetarian customers happy.
3. Offer two versions of any recipe that contains it. An ultra-authentic version, and a slightly more modernised one. Obviously this means more work.


Would you do me a favour and let me know what you think by voting in the poll to your right?
thank you!

Victorian Soap Recipes & Modern Safety Considerations

One of the most important challenges when experimenting with very old recipes is remembering that they had very different ideas of what constitute safe levels of potentially allergen containing ingredients. These days, any cosmetic manufacturer is strongly advised (and in many areas of the world, legally obliged) to calculate the percentages of a number of key allergens present in the ingredients they use, and to label the product accordingly and adjust the formula if they exceed certain amounts deemed safe by the various regulatory bodies.

Our Victorian counterparts didn't have these restrictions, and tended to formulate their commercial recipes based a) on what smelt nice, and b) on what was most cost effective. Quite often point b appears to have been the most important one.

Today, this means that I spend a fair bit of my research time poring over spreadsheet calculations and cross referencing them to things like the IFRA website which lists, amongst other things, internationally accepted codes of practice for safety in cosmetic ingredients. Not being particularly mathematically minded, nor a qualified chemist, this tends to result in a mixture of me being fascinated and learning a lot, and my head hurting, badly.

When I find a recipe that I think I might want to attempt a reconstruction of, I then have two choices to make. Do I make it precisely as written even if my calculations show that it wouldn't be considered an acceptable recipe today, or do I tweak any problematic ingredients to result in something I can at least use safely?

Usually what happens is that if I feel I can learn something from making the original, I make it as closely to the original formulation as I possibly can, mimicing the ingredient types, qualities, method and even the equipment as far as realistically possible. This is the sort of experiment that gives valuable insights into what Victorian soap looked, smelt, felt and behaved like, and also gives me a chance to examine shelf life and what happens in different conditions.

Having made an accurate experimental batch, if the soap appears to have qualities that I think might appeal to a modern user, I recrunch the figures and make small adjustments to bring any problematic ingredients to within modern aceptable levels whilst not losing the overall character of the original. This often just means reducing the amount of fragrancing oils used slightly, but sometimes I may also rebalance the base oils to allow the use of more ethically acceptable ingredients by today's standards. Whale oil products for example are unlikely to go down well with a modern buyer and I think very few people would question my decision to substitute other base fats, but there are also environmental issues with things such as palm oil which I have to weigh up carefully, and decide whether a substitution for something a little easier to source ethically can be justified when weighed against the desire to offer as accurate an interpretation of the original recipe as possible.

Its always a delicate balance, and often I'll calculate then try out half a dozen or more minor variations on a promising looking recipe before I settle on a version that I feel reflects the original well without compromising on modern considerations.

Winter Progress

It seems a very long time since I launched the Victorian Soap Project and set this blog up, and I'm sorry I haven't put an interim update up. I haven't been idle though!

I was delighted that the crowdfunding bid not only reached but exceeded the minimum sum we'd asked for, the funds came through a month or so back and a little bit has been used already to buy in raw ingredients for the samples stage and the rest are safely in the bank to cover the chemist's fees when we get the certification done on the new recipes.  A huge thank you to everyone who invested in this project, we really couldn't have moved it forwards without your help!

I've been steadily working through some original Victorian texts on soapmaking and collating information about ingredients, methods and preferred fragrances- I'll be doing separate posts on each of those over the next few months.

I've also been testing what I hope will become the main base formulation for the 'new' range of shaving soaps. With any modern interpretation of an old recipe there are always compromises that have to be made, and in my case its a matter of making sure the ingredients are these well represented in the historic record but at the same time a combination that works well today to give a soap that feels nice on the skin of the modern user and which will meet the approval of the cosmetic chemist who needs to sign off each new recipe as fit for use today. Fortunatley the Victorians seemed to like much the same textures as my modern day testers do, so I'm confident the final results will be a good reflection of Victorian tastes and methods.

I tend to use my family as guinea-pigs, so most of the boys in the family got soap like this for Christmas

Gareth has also been working on shaving brushes, these are boar bristle so have a nice firm texture, and the handles are boxwood (the dark one in the soap picture above was a bit of ebony relaimed from some dead furniture) . Aren't they nice!

More soon, now we are into the New Year I should make rapid progress, and be updating this blog a lot more often. I'm hoping to be contacting everyone who invested in the project fairly soon to find out which of the proposed range of soaps you'd like in your reward package, hopefully thats something to look forwards to.