Aunt Lilly’s Farm Soap

Reader Contribution by RenÉE Benoit
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I think it’s appropriate that my last soap project for this series is a re-make of the soap that started me off on my soap adventures 50 years ago. If you remember from the castile soap project I mentioned that when I was a young woman my mother introduced me to an old woman named Lilly who lived on a farm near Iowa Falls, Iowa. Lilly was straight out of the pages of The Foxfire Books edited by Eliot Wigginton. She was the real deal and she showed me how to make tallow soap on her wood stove.

The only thing I’m going to do differently this time is I am going to use rendered pig fat (lard) instead of rendered beef fat (tallow). I purposely chose lard because I decided that if I had any leftover after rendering it that I could use it for cooking. Yes, I rendered my own lard for this project. Store-bought lard is—in my opinion—odious stuff. The texture is grainy. I simply don’t like it. Who knows how those pigs were raised and with what chemicals they were fed? I was also able to source pig fat from an organic pig who lived a good life and who was humanely dispatched. If you can’t do this please do what you are comfortable with.

By the way, soap made from animal fat is particularly good for skin irritations like poison oak or ivy and has a nice creamy lather.

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