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He showed us, among other things, an account of a certain village council who were working hard at all this business; and the record of their intense earnestness in getting to the bottom of some matter which in time past would have been thought quite trivial, as, for example, the due proportions of alkali and oil for soap-making for the village wash, or the exact heat of the water into which a leg of mutton should be plunged for boiling all this joined to the utter absence of anything like party feeling, which even in a village assembly would certainly have made its appearance in an earlier epoch, was very amusing, and at the same time instructive.
All manufacturing in the province weaving, tanning, leather-work, flour-mills, soap-making was carried on exclusively by the pupils of the Franciscans. It was more than doubtful whether they could be got to work under any other management, and a sudden cessation of labor might ruin the whole territory."
In contrast to all this primeval elaboration is the simple, common-sense rule: Do not buy the trimmings, make the butcher trim meat before weighing, insist that soap-making shall not be brought back to defile the home, but remain where it belongs, a trade in which the workers can be protected by law, and its malodorousness brought under regulation.
After the food was fried and while the coals were still glowing the fat of oxen and sheep was melted to make candles. Any grease left over was put into a large box, to be used later for soap-making. Lye for the soap was obtained by putting oak ashes in a barrel and pouring water over them.
"In the old times, when women had big estates to look after," she presently pursued, "servants, horses, cows, vegetables and fruit gardens, soap-making and weaving and chickens and babies, they had real responsibilities, they had real interests. Housekeeping to-day isn't interesting. It's confining, and it's monotonous. But take it away, and what is a woman going to do?"
But as spinning, weaving, canning, soap-making, butter, bread, candle, clothes-making and a hundred other functions formerly performed by women in the home, were absorbed into the factories, the young girls often followed the old task into the new plant.
Especially on Saturdays were their services in demand, since at this time of year there was pickling and preserving, soap-making and carpet-weaving; even among the more thrifty households "butchering and packing."
The housewife is told, for instance, to "insist upon getting the meat trimmings." The fat "can be rendered." And then follows the process in soap-making. Mother is to place the scraps of fat on the back of the stove. If she "watches it carefully" and does not allow it to get hot enough to smoke there will be no odor.
At the rear of the church are the remains of five brick structures, where the soap-making and tallow-rendering of the Mission was conducted. Five others were removed a few years ago to make way for the public road. Undoubtedly there were other buildings for the women and male neophytes as well as the workshops. The San Gabriel belfry is well known in picture, song, and story.
The shivering women crowded around the blazing and welcome fire, and seated themselves on rude benches and log seats while they ate and exchanged doughnuts, slices of rusk, or pieces of "pumpkin and Indian mixt" pie, and also gave to each other receipts therefor; and they discoursed in low voices of their spinning and weaving, of their candle-dipping or candle-running, of their success or failure in that yearly trial of patience and skill their soap-making, of their patterns in quilt-piecing, and sometimes they slyly exchanged quilt-patterns.
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