FattyCakes Soap Company

Before anybody in these hollers could buy a bar of soap, they had to make the lye first, and making the lye took all winter. 🪵

That wooden trough in the yard is an ash hopper, and it is the whole secret. All season long the women saved the ashes out of the fireplace and the cookstove, hardwood ashes only, because pine would not do. The ashes went into the hopper, packed down tight, and when soap making time came in the spring they poured water in slowly at the top and let it work its way down through. What ran out at the bottom, dark as strong coffee, was potash lye. Strong enough to eat a hole in your dress. Strong enough to take the hide off your hands.

There was no thermometer and no recipe card. A woman tested her lye by floating something in it. If a fresh egg floated with a circle the size of a dime showing above the surface, it was right. If a chicken feather dipped in it began to dissolve, it was right. Then she carried out the crock of fat she had been saving since hog killing, the scraps and trimmings nobody would eat, and cooked it with the lye in an iron kettle over a slow fire, stirring one direction, for hours. 🫧

What came out was soft brown soap that smelled like woodsmoke, did not lather much, and would absolutely get a stain out of anything. It scrubbed floors, washed dishes, cleaned children, and went into the wash pot on Monday. Some women poured it into a wooden box and cut it into bars once it set. Others left it soft in a crock and dipped it out with a paddle.

Nothing in that scene came from a store. The ashes came from the fire that heated the house. The fat came from the hog. The kettle had been in the family fifty years. A woman looked at what was left over from everything else her household did and made the one thing they could not do without.

There are people who still remember the smell of it, and it is worth asking them about it while you can. 💛