Issue 34, containing: Soap, The Blatant Lies of Technology, On the Matter of Oyles, Commonplaces, &c.

——————————

SOME EDITORIAL NOTES

The thing about getting groceries that should be processed upon returning from the store is that one must, then, take the time to process them.

And will it happen now? What a lovely world if it did.

—————————— 

SOAP: FIT THE THIRD

[As part of our continuing series of reprinted apothecarical exploits within these pages, we return now to the further exploits of Soap –specifically, time to talk about LAVENDER. -Eds.] 

Lavender is a toughie, ingredient-wise– it wasn’t the herbal most frequently added. Powdered orris root (Iris rhizomes), cloves, and storax resins (like bezoin, liquid storax, labdanum, and their various offshoots and adulterated variants) were the usual culprits. A couple of recipes called for lavender flowers, but certainly not the majority, and rosewater was usually what would be added to that dried, grated Venetian Soap when the soapmaker was ready to reform it into wash balls.

In fact, scent-wise… cloves smell spicy/sweet/warm, the various resins all apparently smell warm and vanilla-y, and orris root smells “sweet, soft, powdery, suede-like”– so lavender, which actually has a huge spectrum of possible scents depending on the variety used, might either soften the soap’s entire scent profile or kick it into spicy overdrive. But without the lavender, I did wonder if, somehow, this would be yet another historical cosmetic that somehow smelled like COOKIES.

But! We are attempting to create a specific fictional soap here, so lavender it is– and of a sufficient quantity that it would be specifically identified as the lavender soap.

While the majority of recipes call for the grated soap to be reconstituted with rosewater, both Wecker’s 1660 Cosmeticks and Salmon’s 1685 Polygraphice mention using Oil of Spike in addition to or replacing the rosewater. Oil of Spike was made of spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), which seems to be one of the spicier lavender boys. I, tragically, did not have spike lavender or store-bought Oil of Spike readily to hand– but I did have some dried French lavender (Lavandula stoechas), several bottles of free olive oil I’d gotten as part of a friend’s pantry cleanout, a recipe from 1623, and too much time on my hands, SO GUESS WHAT:

The recipe is from Markham’s The English Hus-wife, and it’s its own delightful adventure– but once I’d drafted this oil, I was then stuck waiting ten days for the soap to dry and twelve days for the lavender oil to cure.

…and so we leave it here, returning to it again Next Time.

—————————— 

THE BLATANT LIES OF TECHNOLOGY

I by no means regret putting in my air conditioners– I now live within a pleasant block of sculpted ice– but… it’s a little disconcerting to be suddenly disconnected from the weather affecting the world outside.

I look out the window, and I see nothing too extreme. I check my weather apps, and I see warnings for heat, humidity, air quality… the sweltering, smothering, pillow-slap of atmosphere that somehow exists just outside my door.

It seems like a failure of the scientifictional worldbuilding I’ve cut my teeth on, that so flimsy a set of walls and windows could become so easily an airlock. Shouldn’t there be the whistling whine of escaping gas? Shouldn’t there be a gasping failure along every unriveted angle, the plaster crushing inward from the pressure differential?

We imagine what the future outside the confines of our planet might be, and there are only a fractional few who have ever experienced it. We spend our time imagining sense memories most of us will never have– and times like this, where there is so much discrepancy between what my experience and what my technology tells me, I wonder how far off in our assumptions we really are.

—————————— 

ON THE MATTER OF OYLES

When originally writing up the Adventures of the Oil of Lavender above, a question was raised by a friendly reader: “Did soapmakers more often use infused oil such as [the] 1623 recipe, or essential oil (extracted e.g. by steam distillation)?”

To which I answered: GOOD QUESTION.

The fun thing about doing all this historical research is that: I had no clue. But I was genuinely excited to spend the next four hours figuring it out and writing up the results.

So. Our first problem, in the particular, is that soap recipes in Europe weren’t particularly well recorded for a good span of time. This seems to be a combination of the recipes for the Very Nice Stuff being protected by soapmaker guilds, and soap becoming taxed in England starting in 1712 (leading to very closely monitored manufacturing and a lack of later-published works describing how to make it from the bottom up, as it were).

This is why, in my opinion, so much of this research seems to turn up either very old recipes (before the introduction of hard white soap) or recipes that start with “buy the expensive thing first and then just, uh, doctor it up a bit for home use, no selling it, nope, not us.” (Sometimes the recipes say to use very old white soap and I’m just like– is that actually important? Or is it because it implies that any soap you have around would be from before it was taxable? NO IDEA.)

Our second problem, in the more general sense, is that a pile of these recipes, particularly the later ones, assume a base level of knowledge by the practitioner. I have more than once recently found myself referencing the wisdom of our cultural touchstone, Schitt’s Creek: 

-Moira: Next step is to fold in the cheese.
-David: What does that mean? What does “fold in the cheese” mean?

“Fold in the cheese” has a meaning we can sort of guess at… but there is a particular meaning to it in cooking that is, to the uninitiated, a secret action that, if one skips, may lead to an imperfect rendition of the desired foodstuff.

Similarly, at least two of these wash ball recipes call for labdanum, a gummy resin thing whose scent is described as “amber, animalic, sweet, fruity, woody, ambergris, dry musk, or leathery”. Nice, right?

Most of these recipes require the use of a mortar and pestle, and at least one of the recipes say that you need to smack it into powder. So I did a search to see how to do that, what with “sticky” not traditionally being an immediate transitory state to “powder”. And with the incredibly in-depth research I did via, ta da, the first result on Google, I found that modern amateurs like myself pretty much… don’t. Maybe we freeze it first? Or we just skip the “powder” and buy a professionally separated scent thingy from a company, because clearly Machinery and also maybe Chemicals are needed for this process.

Which doesn’t make a lot of sense when you consider that this was apparently bog-standard practice by dorks like me five hundred years ago.

What I’ve since found, though, and why my household journal is starting to look more and more like some kind of glitter-highlighted grimoire, is that there are oodles of books of useful how-to’s like Lémery’s 1686 English edition of A Course of Chymistry and Charas’s 1678 English edition of The Royal Pharmacopœea, which provide breakdowns of a lot of these “known to them but not to us” knowledge gaps– but, additionally, there are sometimes just little “oh, by the way, here’s how you fold cheese, in case you ever need to do that” asides that don’t seem to exist anywhere else hiding in the most unexpected of places (looking at you, Salmon’s 1683 Doron Medicum and its absolutely random table of “common ratios” for just about any/all cosmetics I’ve come across and the order you’re supposed to add them like okay, man, fine).

Oh, and the answer to how to powder labdanum and anything else your little alchemical heart may desire? That’s chapter 14 of The Royal Pharmacopœea, “Of Trituration, or Beating in a Morter”. You’re welcome.

Anyway. Oils.

The short answer is… yes, they sort of had essential oils, but no, they weren’t “essential” or even necessarily the best way to maintain the virtue of a particular ingredient, so it wasn’t valued the same way we value them now.

The longer answer: HUMORISM.

(It’s always humoral theory. It’s humoral theory all the way down)

Galenical medicine (e.g., HUMORISM) believed a lot in the idea that everything has an innate sort of value or virtue, and that the best way to get at that virtue was to extract it or distill it or infuse other things with it in the way most likely to maintain that virtue and allow it to be passed on to the patient/customer/family/self.

Anyway, ingredients were considered cold or hot and wet or dry, each to varying degrees, and how you prepared them for use absolutely depended on that information. Lémery says lavender oil can be prepared the same way as aniseed oil is (distilled multiple times in an alembic), and aniseed is, according to Sir Elyot’s 1534 The Castel of Helth, apparently “hotte and drye in the thyrde degree”, so lavender’s virtue wouldn’t suffer in a distilling situation.

So in short, yes, probably we could distill Lavender Oil using the tools available back then to make a very credible essential lavender oil now, but… if you look at the rest of Lémery’s description, what you see is basically the making of a very oil-infused (and possibly fermented?) water. They just… didn’t seem to do essential oils the way we do. This is further backed up by William Salmon again when, earlier in Doron Medicum, he has a section specifically describing how to make or prepare “oyls”:

1. If it be from hot Herbs, dry them, and infuse them twenty, forty, sixty, or a hundred days in good Oyl of Turpentine, or Amber; then strain and press them out, repeating the Infusion if you please, two or three times; lastly, mix this straining with double quantity of Oyl Olive, and keep it for use.

2. But if from cold Herbs, take there expressed Juice, and boyl it in an equal quantity of Oyl Olive, to the Consumption of the Humidity, then strain, and keep it for use.

So, in conclusion: Maybe soapmakers did use essential oils? But probably not. And while I was making the wimpy (possibly even the super-cheap) recipe for Oil of Lavender this time, the next one up the ladder in terms of fanciness involved just boiling lavender flowers in a 50/50 wine and water mix with sesame oil and boiling it down to… what appears to be a liquor rather than an oil. Again. So no version of my lavender soap is going to be as lavender-ish as we would get with a modern– or even pre-modern– essential oil. Getting a really strong lavender scent using traditional recipes is tough. 

Unless, of course, I get an alembick.

Which. I’m pretty sure. I should be allowed to get.

—————————— 

COMMONPLACES

From Anne Carson’s An Oresteia:

But the future– who knows? It’s here soon
enough.
Why grieve in advance?
Whatever turns up, I hope it’s happy–

******

From tropics777:

And in these next 50 years you will eat so many delicious meals, laugh so many times with so many people you love, shout and scream and sing and cry and smile so hard your face hurts. And you will see such beautiful sunsets and feel fresh cold air on your face and feel warm and safe wrapped up in your favourite winter coat.

******

From Terry Pratchett’s Jingo:

Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated. When men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads, they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

—————————— 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

I wonder when this weather will break.

And then too– I wonder what new mystery I might solve with the next book that I open, and the air is cool enough to play again.

******

To the Gentle Readers supporting The Minor Hours: Erste, Sekund, Terzo, and Quartus, thank you for your continuing support!

******

If you would like to write a letter to be produced/answered in the magazine, please email me at minor.hours.magazine@gmail.com with the subject line:

Letter to the Magazine: [subject of letter as you would like to see it printed]

If you wish the letter to be anonymous or under a nom de plume, please state so in the body of the email; similarly, if you’d rather not be printed at all, please also state so in the body of the email. It will otherwise be assumed that mail sent to that address is intended for print.

Alternately, commenting on this post will get you a similar result, with much less fuss.

******

-Until next time, be safe.