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HOW’D THEY DO THAT?
Making soap is not a difficult process--no more challenging than following a recipe for pastry and turning it into a pie. Soap is made up of three basic ingredients: water, lye, and fats (oils). When a lye-and-water solution is mixed with fats, a reaction takes place between the hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and fatty acid molecules. This is called saponification, and the end result is a substance that is made up of five parts soap and one part glycerin. Glycerin--a rich emollient prized for its ability to soften the skin--is retained in handmade soap but in commercial soap it is extracted, leaving behind the hard, drying bars of soap we purchase in stores and supermarkets.
No one really knows how soap-making began, but according to an ancient Roman legend, the very first soaps were created quite by accident, on a hill not far from Rome known as Mount Sapo (from which the term sapoinification is derived). On the hill stood a temple where animals were sacrificed in burnt offerings to the Roman divinities. Below ran the river Tiber, where womenfolk brought their bundles of laundry and washed them in the gently flowing river water. It didn't take the women very long to realize that the best time to take clothes to the riverbank was after it rained--somehow the water seemed softer and more cleansing, and the laundry easier to do. Soon, the connection was made--the white chunks clinging to the rocks on the hill were providing the cleansing magic.
What occurred when the rain fell is very simple: a crude type of lye solution was being leached from the wood ashes on the temple alter. The solution combined with the unburned animal fats as it trickled down the hillside, eventually drying and solidifying--creating a very simple form of soap.
In the centuries of experimentation that followed its initial discovery, soap-making slowly evolved into the sophisticated industry we know today. In eighteenth-century America, for example, soap-making was still a household chore. In those days, wood ashes were collected and mixed with rainwater. On soap-making day the resultant lye solution was mixed with molten tallow (animal fat), which had also been rendered in the home. Eventually "soap chandlers" appeared--they bought fat from homesteaders, rendered it into tallow, made soap, and then sold it back to the homesteaders. They were the forerunners of modern soap manufactures.
Today, commercial soap is manufactured in a process known as the "continuous method" and, as the name suggests, the soap is produced in vast containers where the ingredients are continuously added at one end of the vat while soap is continuously removed from the other. During the process, glycerin is removed.
For the most part, these commercially produced soaps do their job. They get you clean, although they lather meagerly, have a synthetic fragrance, and leave your skin feeling dry and a little like sandpaper. Handmade soap, on the other hand, lathers richly, is naturally fragrant, and moisturizes as well as cleanses, leaving your skin feeling clean, soft, and supple. Handmade soap is also innately reassuring--full of character, natural goodness, and beneficial ingredients such as essential oils and herbs.
The soap-making processes are divided into three categories: cold-process, hand-milling, and melt-and-pour. The cold-process method is the one that most closely resembles the soap-making techniques of yesteryear: a lye solution is combined with various oils and poured into molds to harden.
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