This is the soft soap the colonists had done all their hard work to produce. The soft soap is then poured into a wooden barrel and ladled out with a wooden dipper when needed. To make hard soap, common salt is thrown in at the end of the boiling. If this is done a hard cake of soap forms in a layer at the top of the pot. As common salt may be expensive and hard to get, it is not usually wasted to make hard soap.
Common salt is more valuable to give to the livestock and the preserving of foods.
Soft soap works just as well as hard and for these reasons the colonists, making their own soap, did not make hard soap bars. In towns and cities where there were soap makers making soap for sale, the soap could be converted to the hard soap by the addition of salt. As hard bars it will be easier to store and transport. Hard bars produced by the soap maker were often scented with oils such as lavender, wintergreen, or caraway and were sold as toilet soap to persons living in the cities or towns. Hard soap is not cut into small bars and wrapped as has been familiar.