This old black iron wash pot was given to me by my mother before she died about 20 years ago. She used it to make soap, boil my fathers work clothes, make hominy, render pork cracklings, and heat water for washing our clothes.

Every Monday morning before school, my job was to build a fire under the wash pot to heat the wash water. This was all before automatic washing machines. If you couldn’t afford a wringer washer, it was a scrub board as shown in the photo. Of course the first thing to do was fill the pot with water. We did have running water they call it in those days, but no garden hose, so the wash pot had to be filled by the bucket method.

Sometimes after working all day in the oil fields of East Texas, my father would arrive home with crude oil stains on his work clothes. To clean them, my mother would boil the clothes in the wash pot an hour or so.

All year Mom saved bacon grease, left over fat, and lard from the kitchen to make her own lye soap for washing clothes. She would cut the soap into small pieces, and add it to the ringer washer full of hot water, let it dissolve, and then throw in the clothes.

To make soap she would use a can of lye to about three quarts if water. Red Devil Lye it was. She would stir until the lye was dissolved well; then she would add the grease, lard, and fat. She stirred every now and then until the soap was the right consistency, then she poured it in wooden trays my father made. The next day after the soap cooled, she cut it up into bars. The soap was strong and had some slight bleaching affect on the clothes. The only clothes dryer we had was a clothes line. The clothes had a nice clean fresh smell after hanging in the sun most of the day.

Most of our lard came from making cracklings in the iron pot by placing all the pork rind or skin we had available after butchering a hog. We would build a hot fire under the pot allowing the grease to cook and separate from the fat pork rind. Using a screen strainer, the cracklings were dipped from the pot, and then the grease and cracklings permitted to cool. The lard can be used in cooking and making soap as previously stated. Cracklings can be eaten alone or cooked in cornbread.

To make hominy, one of my brothers, my sister, and I shelled by hand about fifteen ears of corn, picked out the bad cornels and poured the corn in the wash pot. Mom would add the water and lye while I got the fire going. She would allow the corn to cook until it cracked open and swelled. The corn would get big and a bit tender, then we stopped the fire, and allowed the corn to cool.

After the corn cooled we moved the pot and all over to the water faucet, and washed the corn until the outside husk, and the small black things, and hearts washed off and out of the pot.

We rinsed the corn several times to wash out all the lye, restart the fire, and cook the hominy for several hours until tender.

Then she put it up (as she called it) in jars while it was hot.

We had hominy until the next fall. I continue enjoying hominy today as in the good old days.

Read about cast iron cookware.