Curiosity - Farinaceous soap

[Ale]

Hello everyone,
By chance, I found an ancient article about a laundry soap to use in hard water. What was really surprising is that that soap was made with corn meal instead of oils or fats! I've tried searching more information but I couldn't find any.
I wonder how could corn meal react with lye? A bit of soap could be produced by the corn oil contained in the meal, but this would be a very little amount.

This is the article: Hard Waters Softened by a Farinaceous Soap, with the Process for Making the Same : Little, Daniel : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Has anyone heard something similar? Maybe @DeeAnna or others interested in historical methods?

 

[mishmish]

I know that hominy is dried corn kernels cooked and soaked in lye. When ground, that becomes masa for making the dough that becomes tortillas, tamales, etc. Masa is "doughier" than just corn meal, so maybe (guessing here) corn meal boiled for hours with lye water would become a solid cake of something that could absorb oils/dirt and be a delivery vehicle for the wood ash lye. The research material does say that the product doesn't lather, so it's not actual soap. FWIW, when I lived in Italy I had some older friends who remembered that during WWII when oil to make soap with was scarce, what they used instead to wash clothes and scrub floors was just lye water made by soaking ash from the fireplace in a bucket of rain water. I may be off base but this is my guess.

 

[earlene]

Ale, the lye used was made with wood ash, so it's not NaOH in that reference material. In 1787 they did not have access to NaOH or even KOH the way we do.

From the description on the process and the end product, it sounds like this soap is a thick paste, and would produce a sort of scouring cleanser, somewhat like modern day scouring powders.

Nowadays, starch containing soap is not uncommon. Some soap makers use rice water, pasta water, potato water, etc when making lye solution. Of course the type of lye used these days is not the wood ash sort.

Also in the case of this corn meal soap you reference, it is mentioned also that there are a lot of minerals and other impurities in the water they used, so I would suspect some of the cornmeal & other farinaceous (starch containing) substances was absorbing and bonding with some of the impurities in the water. Or perhaps wood ash lye has a capacoity to bind with those impurities in the presence of starch or it facilitates the bond of the starch with the impurities. Or not. But the author does claim the starchy substances render the water more acceptable for starch-soap than for soap made with fats.

 

[Ale]

Ok, so you are suggesting that corn meal is only used to form a solid paste that helps retaining lye and scrubbing linen. It sound a good interpretation. Thank you.



Mishmish, I live in Lombardy, Northern Italy, and I can confirm what you said. Until about 1950 was very common to use wood ash lye instead of laundry soap, especially in the Alps or in rural areas.

Earlene, I've heard of adding starch to soap but I honestly don't know why it is done. I thought that starch helps fixing the scent of essential oils and maybe it could affect the lather. Is it also used as a water softener?

 

[earlene]

Ok, so you are suggesting that corn meal is only used to form a solid paste that helps retaining lye and scrubbing linen. It sound a good interpretation. Thank you.

I'm not really sure, just seemed that way to me while reading the description in that link. I could have missed something, though.

Earlene, I've heard of adding starch to soap but I honestly don't know why it is done. I thought that starch helps fixing the scent of essential oils and maybe it could affect the lather. Is it also used as a water softener?

I don't think it affects the water as a softening agent, but because of the sugar content in starches, it will add bubbles and lather, according to reports by some soapers.

I don't know if starches do a good job of anchoring fragrances or not as I have not really tested that out, but apparently there are some who use cornstarch, arrowroot, and orris root for that purpose. Maybe some other things, as well. I tried it with orris root once, but didn't notice it made any difference, but I may not have used it correctly.

 

[mishmish]

Ok, so you are suggesting that corn meal is only used to form a solid paste that helps retaining lye and scrubbing linen. It sound a good interpretation. Thank you.

Mishmish, I live in Lombardy, Northern Italy, and I can confirm what you said. Until about 1950 was very common to use wood ash lye instead of laundry soap, especially in the Alps or in rural areas.

I lived in Sardinia for 20 years, but I've been back in the US for the last 15.
Yes, that would be my interpretation of the old document that you shared. I can imagine a stiff ground grain paste cooked with wood ash lye would clean pretty well, although it wouldn't be very gentle on the skin. It's just odd that they call it "soap".

 

[Iluminameluna]

I don't know if this is relevant or even tangential, but when I would spend vacations with my country grandma in rural El Salvador, there was no electricity or running water, so ironing was done with wood charcoal in a hollow iron and all her kitchen cloths were made of raw cotton. This is to explain how it was cleaned and whitened.
Corn was soaked then cooked with active lime, what's known as "nixtamal". Then, before it's completely soft, some of it is taken out, peeled, and ground, very finely ground, and used to mix with the wood ash "lye" to clean the kitchen linens.
My grandma told me that the ground up corn would not only help to gently get rid of the food and absorb the oils and grease from the clothes, but it also made them look whiter. A final rinse, and one more handful of the fine starch into that bucket of water, and the almost dry cloths would be ironed, being left nice and starched, and WHITE.

 

[mishmish]

That makes perfect sense. It wouldn't be soap because no oils are involved but lye water would dissolve the oily dirt in the cloth and the ground nixtamal would absorb it. That's really cool. Was your grandmother's mixture boiled with the clothes or rubbed on them and rinsed off?

 

[Iluminameluna]

@mishmish The linens wouldn't be boiled. If they were stained or really dirty, they'd be spread out on busses bushes or clean rocks near the washing "pilas" (pronounced pee'-las) while still damp to be bleached by a combination of the lye water and the sun. It worked amazingly well! Try it yourself sometime if you can. You know the sun will bleach anything of its color if left outside, imagine what it will do of combined with some potash!

 

[mishmish]

I lived in Guatemala for one summer (45 years ago!) and washed my clothes by hand but no one ever showed me the potash/masa trick. I remember ladies beating their wet laundry with paddles.