soapformulator
EN
Toilet bars

Windsor soap

Open in the calculator

The oils

Oil As the source prints it Share
Edible Tallow (beef/mutton dripping) Tallow · 9 parts 90.0 %
Olive Oil (virgin / refined / olive oil) Olive-oil · 1 parts 10.0 %

Everything else

  • Oil of caraway — 5 parts · ozs per 100 lb of soap
  • Oil of bergamot — 10 parts · ozs per 100 lb of soap
  • Oil of cloves — 1.5 parts · ozs per 100 lb of soap; the scan prints "1\", read as 1½
  • Oil of thyme — 5 parts · ozs per 100 lb of soap

How it is made

Process Full-boiled
Alkali Not stated
Superfat Not stated
Water as the source states it
Iodine value 50
INS 145

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 48 29–54
Cleansing 4 below 12–22
Conditioning 46 44–69
Bubbly lather 4 below 14–46
Creamy lather 44 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

The most famous named soap in the book and the simplest: nine parts tallow to one of olive oil, the whole of its character coming from the caraway. Watt gives the perfume twice over, per 1,000 lb of paste and per 100 lb of soap; the per-100 lb figures are the ones entered.

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.150. 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.

All recipes