Let us reflect upon soap.

tl;dr: Soap.

Spoiler Warning: Outcomes involving soap will be revealed.

So, here’s a long story about soap. Before I can tell it I need to go back in history, as do those annoying recipe people on the internet who won’t give you the damned recipe for bread pudding, they insist on telling you the whole story of four or five generations of bread-pudding makers in their family. I am going to tell you about soap and history.

Before I can tell that I will remind you of the well-known story of the woman who always cut an inch from the wide end of her huge roast hams before she put them in the roasting pan. “Why do you do that?” says her partner. “Because my mother always did,” she replies. So off they go to the mother, whose “why” was, “Because my mother always did.” Luckily, the grandmother was still on this side of the soil, and when asked why she cut an inch off her ham roasts, she said, “Because I never had a big enough pan.”

So you see, behaviours can persist without their reasons, down through generations.

So, soap. Now back in the day, soap was big deal. The following pocket history has been strained through my patience and outlook and may contain impurities, but it will still clean the window in the Way-Back Machine. Basically, soap was a thing the women and/or children and/or servants of the house made laboriously from things like saved animal fats and sifted fireplace ash (for the lye), with various scenting agents they grew themselves, and so on. Households had soap kettles, stirring paddles, soap moulds, and a general understanding of the preciousness of the finer grades of soap. “Fancy soap” came from specialty makers and were the stuff of legend, and gifts (birthday mostly, and holidays, I would assume, as giving soap for a courting gift would, it seems to me, have been presumptuous and insulting, all at once. But I have no citation for that, and apparently it was done, so what do I know?)

So then these bars of soap or buckets of soap were used for everything. Washing soap was shaved into tubs of boiling water. A sort of soap-jelly was ladled onto greasy pans for scrubbing. Face soap was carefully used to almost the last sliver.

But there came a moment when those slivers of soap were just too too thin. So then what?

Well, there was a jar. Or a small crock.

In the jar were the heels, as it were, of all the soap. The soap was covered with water, either once the jar was full or right from the get-go, depending on family habit. And that jar lived under the sink or in the pantry or wherever it was out of the way, until the housekeeping unit (I’m trying to be gender inclusive but let’s face it, it was the woman or women of the house, right?) decided one day to mush it all up into liquid soap again, so that it could be used up completely and thriftily (and all the labour to make it wouldn’t be wasted).

This is all pretty smart, and had to have been going on for hundreds of years. But then come specialists, who start making commercial bars of soap. Eventually we end up with Pears. Or Dove. Or whatever (even Irish Spring, heaven help us). (And washing powder. And so on. But right now I am concerned with bar soap.) And now, what we have is soap that is purchased outside the house—but when it is used up to a sliver, it goes in a jar of water. Eventually, some liquid soap for beside the kitchen sink is made from it.

Then some more time goes by. The jar under the sink no longer has water in it. Sometimes it’s just an old plastic peanut butter container with a wide mouth (sometimes shaped like a bear… describing for a friend…) and it gets full of soap, but nothing happens. Another jar is added.

Now, I come from thrifty stock, and because I am a youngest child and was born when my mother was almost 37, and I am getting old(er), I have a direct line that is only two or three women back from 2020 to 1900. My great-grandmother, after whom I am named, was a settler in Alberta in 1904 when most of her twelve children, including my grandmother, were almost adults. I am sure Sarah Candas Smith Berry made her own soap—you can bet on it. She thought nothing of whipping up dinner for 24 on the spur of the moment, and according to my mother, “Willful waste makes woeful want” was something of a mantra of hers.

My grandmother Amanda Mae Berry was born in 1888. She married a storekeeper, so although they also farmed until retirement, I’m pretty sure she bought some of her soap. She and my grandfather were both from thrifty Scots Presbyterian stock, “salt of the Earth” they would say (though I wonder about that phrase a lot, as conquering armies used to salt the earth as they passed so that nothing would grow, but never mind that now), so Amanda Mae definitely would have turned the ends of the soap into liquid soap for kitchen use. They also conveyed a rigidly pragmatic set of life practices unto their five children, including my mother.

My mother was born at the end of 1915. The Great Depression shaped her childhood and thwarted her ambitions, but left her with an iron framework of habits and rules for households, work ethics, and life in general. You can take the girl out of the Scots Presbyterian Church, but you can’t take the Scots Presbyterian out of the girl. The ends of the soap Would Be Saved. We even knew why, and it is possible that during and after the war, when money was tight, she rendered those soap bits back into useable soap, but by the time I came along, the 1950s were spreading the Good News of disposable wealth, unlimited product, and a consumer’s responsibility to buy.

(Also gift soaps got a lot more varied, and Avon came along, but that’s a side rabbit hole I will try not to go down here, even though I still, in 2020, have some of those gift soaps, as by then they had become Too Nice to Use, leading to another necessary storage device on a different shelf, but Never Mind That Now!)

However, my mother was a stalwart who abided by tradition, and my father was careful and meticulous, and together they passed on to us the tradition of the soap-slivers jars. And I, despite what my mother sometimes had to say, was a dutiful daughter.

Also, in the meantime, to complicate the matter, I had learned a trick from a friend: If people are coming to stay, and you have just cleaned the bathroom and want it to look welcoming, put out a new bar of soap. It will make a huge subliminal difference. And it appears that this is so, but it creates a situation where soap-ends proliferate at about double the speed.

Every time I moved, I would look at this soap and speak the traditional words of letting go (“Oh, f*** it, I’m never going to make liquid soap!) and I would throw out anywhere from one to several containers-full.

But we have lived in this house for 18 years.

So normally I would be able to introduce you to a large stash of soap-heels—but sometime in the middle of winter (before COVID-19, so I have no excuse), I was cleaning out under the bathroom sink and I came upon several previously-hand-cream jars full of soap slivers, and an empty liquid soap pump-topped bottle. I then cleaned out the bathroom cupboard, and what surfaced but more ex-soap and another pump bottle?

At that moment, I had a Visitation from Beyond the Grave. The spirits of my ancestors came to me, and entered into me, and I thought of all this history, and I thought, “Maybe I should try that soap thing.”

tl;dr again: Dear Reader, I did.

I had a 9” tall wide-mothed plastic canister that I would otherwise have had to put in recycling. Such was the extent of my dutiful cleaving unto the tradition of generations that I could fill it about 3/4 of the way with a haphazard assortment of leftover soap slabs. I filled it to the top with water and tightened the lid, and shook it up a bit. Every now and again I would shake it again, and over the ensuing seven or eight months, the contents have devolved into  a strange beige soup with small masses of mysterious white and ivory lurking in the depths like koi in a scholar’s green-tinted garden pond. (see left side of photo)

Another aside. Those who know me might think that the only thing domestic about me is that I live in a house, and to some degree it is true. But it is a house that retains many of the scaffolding techniques inherited from those people of iron, those generations of makers and keepers and recyclers and re-users. And I like my house, and despite occasional appearances to the contrary, I like it in order.

So it pleases me inordinately that as of this afternoon, beside both the bathroom and kitchen sinks sit re-used pump-topped hand soap bottles full of liquid soap, sufficiently soapy to do its job. And the container of dissolving soaps, which resembles sourdough starter in many ways, has been topped up to start creating the inevitably-necessary refills.

So—and thank you for waiting—here’s my mother’s recipe for bread pudding.

My mother Marie Dorsey’s Bread Pudding

Preheat oven to 350ºF. (We are pre-metric here. History is like that.)

In a deep (4+ inches), round 8- or 9-inch casserole dish, mix together:

• either 2 or 3 eggs
• ¾ cup to 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup milk

Note: This isn’t about measuring-cup cooking. Use a coffee cup if you want, but not one of the big ones.

Cube and, if desired, butter all the leftover crusts and heels of bread you’ve saved in a bag in the fridge. If necessary, top up with enough sliced bread, cubed, to fill the dish to within 1 inch of top. (My family of origin would use white bread and white sugar and make a pale pudding, but darker breads and brown sugar will make a darker pudding.)

Add:

• some raisins if desired (a handful or two, or a cup. You know, some.).

Stir perfunctorily.

Cover to top of bread contents with:

• some more milk. (You know. Some.)

Stir again if you feel like it. Or not.

Top with:

• a liberal amount of cinnamon and a touch of nutmeg.

Bake in 350° oven for about one hour or microwave oven for approximately 10-12 minutes (time depends on the microwave). It is done when it rises, the top is slightly brown (in conventional oven), and when, if pudding is pricked with a wooden toothpick, toothpick emerges clean.

Putting a custard, caramel or chocolate sauce on top is daring and revisionist, but not a mortal sin.

Equally delicious served hot or cold.

Gluten-free note:  If making with gluten-free bread, you probably will have to use the larger number of eggs for binding, even in the smaller sized dish. Gluten-free breads differ widely in composition, so consider your first attempt a test.

(p.s. BTW, this recipe will also appear in Food of My People, the anthology of food-related speculative fiction Ursula Pflug and I just edited and Exile Editions will be publishing sometime in 2021. And if you think that makes this post nothing but soft-soap and sawdur, well, you read to the end, didn’t you, so here we are together: wash your hands and have some bread pudding.)