California and the Pacific Coast

Everything in the pot traveled to get here.

The olives came from the Mediterranean, carried by people who had never heard of California and pressed now in groves a few hours from my kitchen. The meadowfoam is an Oregon crop, and it traveled the shortest distance of anything I use, and it is still the ingredient almost nobody can name. The prickly pear grows wild across this state and across half of Mexico, and has been food and medicine here far longer than it has been an oil anyone sold. The copal I am working with now is a resin that was burned in Mesoamerica for centuries before it was ever a scent note in a bar of soap, and I don’t intend to treat it as one.

And in the middle of the 1930s, my father’s people walked out of Oklahoma with what they could carry.

Nothing on this coast is from this coast. That is the first thing to understand about making soap here, and it sounds like an apology until you look at what it actually produced.

Before there was a state, the ranchos here were already in the soap business without making any. They sold cattle hides east to the tanneries and tallow south to the candle and soap works of South America. The fat was leaving before the soap was arriving. Then everyone came at once. A German boy of seventeen stepped off into the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1860 and bought a failing soap concern out of a shack on Second Street; within a generation it covered forty acres. Mexican families had been rendering and boiling here for decades before he showed up. Chinese laundries in San Francisco did the washing for a city of men who had arrived to dig and had not arrived to launder. And then the Okies came, out of a place where women leached lye from hardwood ash in a barrel behind the house, because a bought bar of soap was not a thing you spent money on.

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Six methods. One coast. All of it landing inside of forty years.

France protected one method for six hundred years and made it law — one city, one oil, one process, defended by people who will still tell you exactly which of it counts. Korea has the bathhouse, the scrub, the barley tea. Aleppo has laurel. Those are traditions in the strict sense: a single line, held deliberately, handed down.

California has no such line. What California has is everyone else’s, arriving all at once, none of it dissolved.

That is not a lesser inheritance. It is a different one, and it is the honest inheritance of anyone making soap on this coast. When I say this bar is Californian I do not mean every drop of it was grown within sight of the water. Some of it is. The babassu is Brazilian and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The coast is the terroir. The knowledge came from everywhere. Any maker here who tells you their tradition is pure is selling you a story about a place that has never once worked that way.

What the convergence left behind is a temperament, and the temperament is what I formulate in.

It is frugal first. You use the oils that work. You keep the ends. You cure the bar for as long as it needs rather than as long as you can afford to wait, which makes the whole enterprise slower than it has any commercial right to be. Most of what goes into one of my bars turns into soap and does the plain, unglamorous job of lifting oil off your skin. That is the base, and the base is thrifty on purpose. It is the part I suspect my great-grandmother would recognize, though I have not yet been able to ask anyone who would know.

And then there is one thing spent.

Every bar carries something deliberately left over — oil that never becomes soap, that simply stays. A clay. A botanical. A fat too good to saponify. None of it is necessary. It is the reason the bar does not strip you, and it is also, plainly, the pleasure. A frugal base and one extravagance. That ratio is the whole craft, and it is what I will be writing about here for a long time.

I am a work in progress. So is this coast, still, after all this time.

Taking care of your skin is not complicated. Real fat, real lye, real patience. Everything else is where it came from, and who carried it.