Excellent
Liquid Castile soap brings back old memory of scents and stages of 'handcrafted' and none of that distinctive sting. It's terrific. It's thinner and different from the big factory brands. As boiling whole hogs start the process, maybe it's vegetarian now.<br /><br />It brings back old memories and cleans your hands.<br /><br />Soap-making tradition on the large family farm was an institution ... mom, g-g-ma, g-ma, g-g aunts & uncles, aunts and uncles, dozens of cousins. It was a late-fall, early winter tradition, as I recall, shortly after the outdoor open fire, copper vat (we kids figured you could boil one of us in them), sales quantity, apple butter endlessly stirred by the cousins.<br /><br />So I'm maybe ten years old and beginning my hired-hand, unpaid farm apprentice-ship. My recollection of homemade soap's main ingredients includes strange, clear slabs of jelly-like rendered hog fat, sacks of lye (bad stuff), and charcoal, among other things likely 200, maybe 300 years old. From these bases came a line of products. Pine tar soap for work hands, lye soap bars for dishes and laundry, and various soaps and cleansers made from dilution of the lye soap. The only soaps purchased included Ivory, Murphy's oil soap, and PineSol.<br /><br />Yes, the lye soap could sting. We kids just thought the sting was what clean felt like.
Rating: 5 stars