The more steeped I become into the so-called “homesteading lifestyle,” the more “homesteading arts” I endeavor to undertake. Beekeeping, worm composting, gardening, and chicken keeping have entered my life over the past 6 years, and I could write volumes on any of those at any given time (and will eventually get around to it, I’m sure). Two of the more mysterious activities I have tried, however, are cheese making and soap making.
I dub these activities as “mysterious” because you essentially start with one thing (or a few “one things”), and after a certain process and a given period of time, you end up with something else.
One could certainly make the argument that such is the case with worm composting; however, that process is about as straight-forward as it gets. I dump the compost into the bin, the worms eat the compost, then the worms poop it out. It doesn’t get much more fundamental than that. Soap and cheese making are, however, a totally different story.
Take cheese making, for example.
You start with three essential ingredients: milk of some kind, bacteria cultures, and rennet. Then, you heat and cool, wait and stir, press and strain, and wait a bunch more, and eventually you’ve got cheese. The kind of cheese you make is determined by the particular culture you use, and the amount of time you wait is determined by the kind of cheese you make. Mozzarella, for example, can be ready to eat in a couple of hours, while a good farmhouse cheddar takes 3-6 months to cure.
Soap making is a similar miracle. I made cold process soap for the first time Sunday evening, and it was way too cool, to say the least. Like cheese, you essentially start with very few ingredients: fats and/or oils (I used lard, coconut oil, and canola oil), lye, and water. Again, you heat and cool, mix and stir, stir and stir, then pour and wait. After 24 hours, you cut it into bars, then you wait and wait and wait some more – generally 6-8 weeks. Over that timeframe, the saponification process continues, and your soap becomes milder and gentler over time, as well as harder and more easily handled.
The biggest question I have in all of these “adventures of mystery” is: Who the heck tried it the first time?
Take soap, for example. According to this article
How to Make Lye: 15 Steps (with Pictures) – wikiHowyou make lye by rinsing the ashes resulting from the burning of hard or fruitwoods in a barrel, filtered through straw and rocks, and drain the rinse water out the bottom of the barrel. The desired strength of your lye solution determines the number of times you rinse your ashes. Who thought this up? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had the urge to rinse my fireplace ashes in a barrel. In fact, I confess it has never crossed my mind.
Then there are the fats and oils. Back in the “olden days” all soaps were made with animal fat, most commonly beef tallow or pork lard. This, too, required preparation through a process called rendering, and this article in Mother Earth News (never let it be said that I am a close-minded conservative <winking and smiling>) walks the average citiphyte through the rendering process:
How to Render Lard(It should be noted that I bought my lye from Amazon and my lard in the baking section at QFC).
WikiPedia (definitive source that it is)
reportsthat the earliest documented existence of soap dates back to 2800 BC in ancient Babylon (modern day Iraq).
So, picture it with me. One day Abuwaqar says to his wife, Beltis, “Beltis, Baby…I think the next time we butcher a hog (before Islam, so it could happen), we should follow the directions in the Mother Earth News on rendering lard and the WikiHow article on making our own lye, and we should mix the lard and the lye together. Then, after we let it sit for 6 weeks or so, we should use it to clean our bodies in something called a bath.”
…and voila, the Ivory Soap Company was born! (99 44/100% Pure” – if you didn’t get that, it’s okay…you’re just young. )
Cheese is even more intriguing.
The milk I get. And, the bacteria probably occurred naturally somewhere. But, the rennet? (Those of you who willfully choose to remain ignorant about the origins of your food, you may want to stop reading here. Warning: Graphic descriptions to follow).
The Free Online Dictionary defines rennet as follows:
1. The inner lining of the fourth stomach of calves and other young ruminants.
2. A dried extract made from the stomach lining of a ruminant, used in cheese making to curdle milk.
Back to the center of all knowledge,
WikiPedia indicatesthat the origins of cheese predate history and are assumed to lie in the practice of transporting milk in the stomachs of ruminants. By the beginning of the Roman Empire, cheese making was an established activity.
So, essentially, the ancient traveler starts out at one end of the Silk Road with a goat’s stomach (no longer resident in the goat) full of milk. When he arrives at the other end of the Silk Road, he opens up his traveling fridge and discovers a stomach full of feta cheese. It could happen, right?
But, then here’s the biggest question of all…who ate it first?
Traveler 1: “What’s this stuff?”
Traveler 2: “Some goat milk product. Supposed to be good for ya’.”
Traveler 1: “Did you try it?”
Traveler 2: “I’m not gonna’ try it. You try it.”
Traveler 1: “I’m not gonna try it.”
Traveler 2: “Let’s get Abuwaqar.”
Traveler 1: “Yeah!”
Traveler 2: “He won’t eat it. He hates everything.”
Abuwaqar: (looking very stony-eyed after chewing on some poppy flowers, digs into the feta cheese).
Traveler 2: “He likes it! Hey Abuwaqar!”
This proves my husband’s theory that large amounts of alcohol or other mind-altering substances had to be involved in the origins of many of our foods. But then, this raises a whole new set of questions…the origin of alcohol?