Civil War era Cold Cream

[Music] welcome to civil war digital digest i'm your host jeremy today as we talk about cold cream yes cold cream a cosmetic that's another way to use lard in the 19th century so what is cold cream well pretty much the same as it's used for today it's a cream that can be used to soften the skin remove help of blemishes and wrinkles and different things like that actually we have a poem from 1814 that i think does a great job providing a real description of what cold cream did does and why it was so important let's take a listen when a pot of cold cream to eliza you send you with words to the purpose your present commend whoever with this cream shall her countenance smear all redness and roughness will straight disappear and the skin to a wonder be charmingly clear if pimples arise this will take them away if the small pox should mark you those marks will decay if wrinkled through age or bad dwabbing the faces it will be smooth in a choice as the venice glass is so as we can hear from that quote a lot of uses for cold cream and some pretty bold statements there on what it can do too so let's make up a version of that and i picked this one out of the american family receipt book from 1854. it's simple it just had a few ingredients some of the other ones are a little bit more involved and and actually some ingredients that are harder to find it actually lists many like one two three four five and we're doing cold cream number two out of that book let's talk about our ingredients the first one of course is lard which we have four ounces of lard here and we're using a nice leaf lard it's got a really low melting point doesn't have a porkiness to it as we talked about in some of our previous lard episodes as well and then jojoba oil which this is a substitute because the directions actually say to use spermacetta oil which is a type of whale oil which isn't legal to get anymore and for good reason so i found in the research that starting in the 1970s the jojoba oil started being used in cosmetics as a replacement to the spermacetta oil so that's what we're going to use today so there's three quarters of an ounce of that oil and then we have a quarter of an ounce of orange flour water and then about six or seven drops and it's pretty hard to see in there of essence of lavender so our first step here is to combine the lard and that oil i'm going to give this a bit of a stir and then it says to melt this so we're going to set it over on our trivet behind me and get it a little bit more melty to make sure that that oil and the lard combine all right so we have the oil and the lard nicely melted and combined so now we're going to take that quarter of an ounce of orange flower water and those six or seven drops of lavender essence i can really smell it already it smells pretty good so we're going to give this a good stir combine all those ingredients together well all right and now we're going to let this cool off i'm going to sit outside it's kind of a cool day out so this will solidify and then we'll see how our cold cream works all right so we've let our cold cream cool down so it's got a little bit of a nice thicker consistency at this point probably transfer it into a storage vessel maybe a small ceramic dish that could maybe have a lid on it to keep it nice and clean and then use as needed but i have of course my beautiful wife here felicia who needs no cold cream but she's still going to try this out first the smell i don't know if i cared for the orange flower water or the lavender on its own but better together yeah together it's nice and you got that uh jojoba oil in there as well so let's give it a try sure yeah i'll just go for it you know living on the farm my hand has been pretty dry so i'll go for this i can say one thing already a little goes a long way yes yes a tiny dab will do yeah but i could definitely see if i had even dry chapped hands uh this would really take care of that it reminds me quite a bit of bag balm yeah that people still buy today to use for chapped hands i feel like it has a somewhat consistency there's a little bit of a greasiness to it i think it's going to soak in nice yes so there we got it another use for lar during the 19th century cold cream we work hard in the fields all day to come in or work hard in the home gosh doing everything washing dishes and laundry and cooking and the cleaning and the children this can be a lifesaver to save those hands especially in those winter months thank you for watching this episode of civil war digital digest on behalf of the digest and our farm history acres thank you for watching and we'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Civil War Digital Digest

Views: 1,915

Keywords: CWDD, history, dighist, digital history, digital historian, education, research, connection, civil war, dry hands, cold cream, cosmetics, dry skin, lard, lavender, orange flower, poem, homesteading, back to basics, all natural

Id: lZ7a1j_p4V0

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022