Household bars

White cocoa-oil soap (Sturtevant's process)

The oils

Oil	As the source prints it	Share
Coconut Oil	Cocoa-nut oil · 2072 lb	92.5 %
Olive Oil (virgin / refined / olive oil)	Olive-oil · 168 lb	7.5 %

How it is made

Process	Full-boiled
Alkali	325 gallons soda ley at 24° B. and 60 gallons potash ley at 20° B. · 385 imp gal
Superfat	Not stated
Water	as the source states it
Iodine value	14
INS	237

This is a boiled soap. A kettle soap has its excess alkali salted out and drawn off before framing, so the recipe states the alkali charged, never the alkali the bar keeps. Read as a modern cold-process recipe it would be lye-heavy.

What the numbers say

Hardness 75 above 29–54

Cleansing 63 above 12–22

Conditioning 15 below 44–69

Bubbly lather 63 above 14–46

Creamy lather 12 below 16–48

Computed from the fatty acids of the fats above. The bands are what the craft has settled on, not chemistry — a bar outside one is not wrong.

The source

Watt allows "olive or other sweet oil, or tallow" for the 168 lb line; entered as olive, the first named. The potash ley is used with the soda "only for the finer qualities of soap".

Alexander Watt, The Art of Soap-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Hard and Soft Soaps, Toilet Soaps, Etc., Crosby Lockwood and Co., London, 1884, p.74. The Art of Soap-Making: A Practical Handbook of the Manufacture of Hard and Soft Soaps, Toilet Soaps, Etc. · read 2026-09-22

Read from the Internet Archive OCR of the Cornell University Library copy. Page numbers are taken from OCR'd running headers and may be one out where the header digits were damaged.

Read from a scan rather than a proofread transcription, so the figures are checked against the book’s own printed total where it prints one.

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