The Art of Wartime Thrift: Making Soap at Home
With soap prices high, a University of Washington expert shares the process for turning waste kitchen grease into cleaning supplies.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Even dishwashing soap is worth money. Miss Gertrude Elliott, manager of the Commons at the University of Washington, when asked whether she thought it worth while for small restaurants to make their own soap, said: 'Well, I should say it would. Not a pound of old grease should be wasted. Anyone can make soap in five minutes spare time. We make 175 pounds every two weeks from our waste grease. If we sold it we would get only three or four cents a pound for it at most. If we bought manufactured soap we should have to pay about six cents a pound for greatly inferior soap.' The process is as follows: Forty-four pounds of strained grease are put to boil. Into this are poured eight 12-ounce cans of lye. About 11 quarts of water are added and the mixture allowed to boil for a little over an hour. It is then allowed to cool and is cut into hunks.
“Not a pound of old grease should be wasted.”
During wartime shortages, domestic production became a civic duty. While we rarely render our own fat today, the 'zero waste' philosophy of the 1917 kitchen serves as a direct ancestor to modern sustainability movements.
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