The recipe for soap basically required animal fat and ashes. (How many people remember the lyrics to a song about grandma's lye-soap?) Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson - "Mrs. TJ" - and her workforce made lots of it - both soap and "soft soap" - timing of manufacture seems to follow butchering, and time of soft soap seems linked to by-products of _hog_ butchering, but that's just an impression (i.e., I haven't researched the distinction between soap and soft soap as she used the terms.) Check out her domestic accountbooks - you can access them on-line at Library of Congress's American Memory site : just search on her name. They're one of the few things extant in her handwriting, and survive for most of the period of their marriage. Here is an example I mention in a discussion of Martha Jefferson’s daily management of the household at Monticello in a forthcoming chapter : "When Martha Wayles Jefferson directed the making of soap on June 20, 1774, the result was fifteen gallons of soft soap and fifty-four pounds of hard soap. When she made candles on March 13, 1774, she and her slaves finished twelve dozen." . . . Etc. In addition, there is a good discussion of soap-making, brewing (she was evidently very good at brewing) and the like in Jack McLaughlin, _Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder_ (New York, 1988). And of course soap shows up in lots of 18th- and 19th century recipe books, and is discussed in some of the scholarship on cooking etc by the likes of Karen Hess. A slippery subject of course Jon > And now for something completely different: > > I see a reference in Jefferson's accounts in 1773 to buying soap from a > slave. Apparently the slave was making the soap, so I am asking if anyone > can point me to a source that would explain how 18th-century farming folk > made their soap. Nothing to get lathered up about. > > Henry Wiencek > > Dr. Jon Kukla, Executive Vice-President Red Hill - The Patrick Henry National Memorial 1250 Red Hill Road Brookneal, Virginia 24528 www.redhill.org Phone 434-376-2044 or 800-514-7463 Fax 434-376-2647 - M. Lynn Davis, Office Manager - Karen Gorham, Associate Curator - Edith Poindexter, Curator