My grandmother was full of wisdom for me in my early years of marriage. She had all kinds of tips, especially tips that would help me save money. She lived about 5 minutes from where my husband and I set up our first home together. One afternoon when I was visiting, I was drying lunch dishes while she washed. (My grandmother never had an automatic dishwasher.) She and I were talking about how much easier life was now/then than when she first married, mere months before the stock market crash of 1929. I asked for details about how she did ordinary things in the home. Here's what she shared with me:
"Take this dish soap," pointing to the bottle of Ivory. "I had nothing like this then."
"I used to take a bar of soap and grate it and store it in a jar. After meals, when it was time for me to clean up, I put a spoonful of it [grated soap] into a tea cup and added boiling water from the stove. I stirred until all of the soap was dissolved. I stirred in a heaping spoon of bicarbonate [baking soda], too. When it was ready, I poured this into the dishpan and added the boiling water for washing."
Me, incredulous, responded something like this, "really? Grated bar soap and baking soda is what you used for dishwashing?"
"Yes, dear. Where we lived, this is what we all used in those days to wash dishes. Sometimes I ran out of bar soap and couldn't buy more for a while. In those days I used just bicarb to clean dishes and a lot of elbow grease to scrub pots. Bicarbonite was always cheap. Bar soap was more precious during the Depression."
I've held this little homemaking tidbit in the back of mind all of these years, meaning to try this out someday.
One day in early November (around the time I had a dental infection and was desperate to get my surgery), our dishwasher went kaput. The part we need is no longer available, wouldn't you know. So we've been hand-washing all of our dishes since. The only bright spot in my dental ordeal is I was not expected to wash dishes for about a week.
I've been surprised by how quickly we go through a bottle of liquid dish detergent. One evening last week, as I was filling the washpan with hot water, I noticed we were nearly out of dish soap. That's when my memories of my grandmother's stories and wisdom came to the surface. I wondered if I could use just a little dish soap and a very heaping spoonful of baking soda to wash the dishes that night.
And you know what? It turned out that I could. All of the dishes came out sparkling clean. Even the pots and skillet cleaned up without the addition of more soap. And this is what we used for the rest of last week and all of the weekend.
Wanting to see if other folks had tried this in recent years, I went online and discovered that, yes, a little baking soda is a great way to amplify soap's cleaning abilities. A small amount of soap can clean more dishes with baking soda added than just the same amount of soap by itself.
From RusticWise.com:
We've also found it extremely helpful to pre-rinse all greasy dishes or pots before adding them to the soda/soap water.
I have yet to try this with just baking soda, as my grandmother said she had to do. I will let you know if baking soda alone will clean dirty dishes when I perform that experiment. For the meantime, I now know how to stretch small amounts of liquid dish detergent. Thanks, Nana.
