Wool Laundry

In the handwritten cookbook of my great-grandmother Jenny (1883-1940) you can discover not only baking and cooking recipes, but also a few pages of historical laundry care tips. Jenny deals with wool laundry on the last page of her book. This household tip uses a soap that is still used in some households today: gall soap.

Method:

  1. The woollen laundry is washed with fairly warm gall or wool soapy water, the laundry being stroked more than rubbed.
  2. Then the woollen laundry is let through the wrings and everything is placed in foot high warm water.
  3. When everything is ready, it is rinsed again in a large tub with warm rainwater, let through the wooden mangle and hung up in a very warm room.

Note: A wringer was usually a wooden mangle in which the distance between the two counter-rotating wooden rollers could be set closer or wider to one another.