Deer fat for soap?

[cynthialee]

I know you can turn just about any fat or oil into soap. So I was wondering if any of you have soap recipes for various game animal fats?

 

[Black Hand]

http://www.brambleberry.com/Pages/Lye-Calculator.aspx

 

[cynthialee]

Thank you for that soap calculator page. That will come in handy.

When I started my thread I was thinking more along the lines of a soap recipe that one might find on the frontier.

 

[Black Hand]

That describes lye soap - Fat & lye. Castile (olive oil) soap might have been available through traders.

 

[bubba.50]

one thing I would recommend is not to use deer fat. it's more like wax than like grease. boiled some ribs til the meat fell of the bone, threw them on the grill with some b-b-q sauce & expectin' a delicacy bit into'em. took a 1/2 hour to scrub all the gunk off my teeth.

most early soap was basically lye dissolved in hot water & mixed with melted lard or some other fat. ratio would depend on if ya want soft soap or cakes. other than lard probably bear or buffalo fat would be most common. ya could also use vegetable shortenin' most likely.

lye can be made from wood ashes & ya can likely find a recipe on the google-web. if ya know anybody has some foxfire books you can find all kinds of early days know-how in them.

well, luck & have a good'en bubba.

 

[tenngun]

Soap was in the list of stuff brought to rendezvous and was sold at trading post. Raliegh traded it in the Americas before his ill fated colony. I don't know if the MM had lye or castile. I've used quicky soap deer fat and ashs to wash myself in the woods.

 

[necchi]

There's plenty of folks around these parts that'll use just about everything possible from harvested game,
That said, I haven't heard of soap from deer fat/lard.
Plenty of salves and ointments, but not soap

 

[cynthialee]

I did some searching around and deer fat will make a nice soap. All the recipes are modern, calling for lye.
I remember when I was a kid my granny would make soap from ash and fat. But she never let me hang out with her when she made the soap as she didn't want me in her hair when she was busy. She used the soap she made for laundry.

 

[tenngun]

the ash is just providing the lye. You can just leach it out of ash with water and use that for your soap making.

 

[Black Hand]

The ash provides KOH (Potassium hydroxide) and when used, makes "soft" soap. It is my undestanding that you can make it harder by adding salt to the mix.

Lye/NaOH (Sodium hydroxide) is used to make "hard" soap.

Still investigating soap-making...

 

[cynthialee]

I found this web page with some interesting history of soap:
http://www.alcasoft.com/soapfact/history.html

At first the earliest settlers simply brought a plentiful supply of soap along with them. The Talbot, a ship chartered by the Massachusetts Bay Company to carry persons and supplies from England to its colonies at Naumbeak now known as Salem and Boston, listed among its cargo 2 firkins of soap. A firkin is an old measurement which was a wooden, hooped barrel of about nine gallon capacity. John Winthrop, who was to become the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when writing to his wife in 1630 from Boston included soap in a list of necessities to be brought on her crossing to the New world.

After the colonists were settled and had been able to survive the first years of hardships, they found it more advantageous to make soap themselves using the copious amount of wood ashes, a natural result of their homesteading activities. With also a plentiful supply of animal fat from the butchering of the animals they used for food, the colonists had on hand all the ingredients for soap making. They did not have to rely on waiting for soap to be shipped from England and waste their goods or few pieces of currency in trade for soap.

Soap with some work and luck could be made for free. Soap making was performed as a yearly or semiannual event on the homesteads of the early settlers. As the butchering of animals took place in the fall, soap was made at that time on many homesteads and farms to utilize the large supply of tallow and lard that resulted. On the homes or farms where butchering was not done, soap was generally made in the spring using the ashes from the winter fires and the waste cooking grease, that had accumulated throughout the year.

 

[MSW]

cool - thanks for the post ...

my wife makes goat milk soap, and I always get funny looks at the hardware store when I buy lye in bulk ...

then there's the ultimate wisea$$ answer when they ask, "what are you going to do with all that cheesecloth?"

"Make cheese."

 

[Loyalist Dave]

I did some searching around and deer fat will make a nice soap. All the recipes are modern, calling for lye

As Black Hand pointed out..., soap from wood ashes makes a soft soap. Adding salt, in the form of sea water, and using extra virgin olive oil, when properly done will give you a hard soap aka Castile.

The Talbot, a ship chartered by the Massachusetts Bay Company ..., listed among its cargo 2 firkins of soap. A firkin is an old measurement which was a wooden, hooped barrel of about nine gallon capacity.

This was because the soap was semi-liquid, soft soap. Castile soap was sold in "chests", or by the bar. Castile was popular with sailors, and thus was carried around to hundreds of ports, because it will give a person lather when washing clothes in sea water aboard ship.

LD

 

[Billnpatti]

I can remember my great grandma making lye soap. She used hog fat, though. She also made her own lye from ashes. To make her lye solution, she would fill a wooden barrel with hardwood ashes. I think her ashes came mostly from oak and mesquite wood that she used to fire her kitchen stove. Then she would slowly trickle rain water through the ashes and catch it as it ran out a hole in the bottom of the barrel. Once she had the water from the ash barrel, she would boil it until it would float an egg. Then the lye would be concentrated enough to make soap. She would add the lye to the lard in her cast iron pot and heat and stir until it formed soap. She would pour the soft soap into a wooden mold box to let it harden for a few days. then she would take the box off the soap cake and let the cake dry for a few more days to finish hardening. Following that, she would cut it into bars and set them so they would "dry", as she called it. Actually each step of this "drying" process was actually what is called saponification, the chemical conversion of fat into soap. When the soap stopped "sweating" (little droplets of caustic moisture forms on the outside of the bars as they cure or saponify) the soap was ready to use. Woe be unto those who tried to bathe with it before it was through saponifying. that was where lye soap got its reputation for being hard on one's skin. Once it was properly cured, it was a nice mild soap. While she used hog lard for her soap, I don't suppose the recipe would change if one wanted to use lard from another animal.

I would imagine there was a correct ratio of lye to fat but I never saw her actually measure anything. I think she just used the same method of making soap as she did in making her wonderful "Cat Head" biscuits......a dab of this and a dab of that......all done by feel and by eye. Her biscuits were delicious and her soap got everything clean.....people, clothes, dishes, etc. All done while she had a pinch of Garrets snuff on the end of a peach tree twig in her mouth. She reminded me of "Ma" in the old "Ma and Pa Kettle" movies.....if anyone is old enough to remember those old movies.

 

[bpd303]

:thumbsup: Yep I remember Ma & Pa Kettle...
My wife makes her lye soap out of beef tallow & adds different scented ingredients, I can't remember which but that soap is the best for taking the sting & itch out of tick & chigger bites when she adds flowers of sulfur.

 

[Billnpatti]

ff Many folks use a very old treatment to avoid chiggers and ticks by putting flowers of sulphur in old Bull Durham bags and use them like powder puffs to powder themselves all over with a light dusting of sulphur before going into areas where they are likely to encounter ticks or chiggers. It works fine as long as you completely cover yourself with the sulphur. I found a much better way of doing it several years ago. They used to make lozenges containing sulphur and cream of tartar and they were sold over the counter in drug stores. I don't know what their intended purpose was but if you ate two every day for a couple days before going into the tick or chigger area and continued to eat two a day while there, you had no problems with either ticks or chiggers. The way they worked is that your body does not metabolize sulphur and it comes out in you perspiration. It covers your body everywhere with a slight trace of sulphur. It is just enough to keep the critters off you. Only thing is that you will need to wash your hunting clothes separate from your other laundry because it will smell like sulphur. Also, for a couple days after you quit taking the sulphur and cream of tartar lozenges, you will continue to exude sulphur. It doesn't mix well with after shave. :shake: :barf: The stuff is no longer available, or at least, I have not been able to find it. You can just get some flowers of sulphur and mix it with some molasses to get it down. Take a couple spoons of it each day before and during your hunt and it will do exactly the same as the lozenges. Sure you stink like sulphur a little bit during and shortly after a hunt but the animals seem not to care. Maybe it hides your natural scent. :idunno: and you will have a slightly noticible scent for a couple days after returning from the woods but.....NO CHIGGERS AND NO TICKS. You decide if it is a fare trade. :hatsoff:

 

[gmarc]

Cynthia

I have had good luck with any at that I have "clarified" first.

I do this by melting the fat at a low temp to avoid scorching or browning it. Just let it separate from its collagen rind.

Take this product and gentlty heat it again in a pot on teh stove. While its in the pot, stir in enough water to raise the whole level about one inch. Allow this mixture to cooland the small flakes of collagen will sink, while the fat floats above the layer of water.

Once allowed to cool, you should have a disc-shaped piece of solid fat, which should be snow-white in color.

There may be a layer of collagen stuck to the bottom of the clarified fat layer, this can be scraped off. This fat can be used in your soap now.

 

[Rick Son]

Try some of this sometime,soap up in a hot shower and rinse with cold water,will wake you up!We used to use it in homemade suanas~Last forever too.
http://www.vitacost.com/dr-bronner...018787765166&gclid=CPXPluPxurkCFWfhQgod0hEAkA

 

[Rick Son]

Just don't let no body hang ya upside down and try ta strike ya on a rock!

 

[cynthialee]

TY

If/when I get a deer I plan on making some soap. Will let ya'll know how it turns out.