Common Pomatum, c.1772-1784

Finally playing around with the receipts in The American Duchess Guide to Beauty. That is, I finally found a place to order mutton tallow.

The common pomatum seemed a good place to start. It's quite like the later Victorian pomatums I've made (melt two fats together and scent as desired), but this time I decided to do things properly and use the mutton tallow and leaf lard, rather than beef tallow and the hydrogenated lard that my grocery story actually carries.  The receipts in this book are adapted from the Toilette of Flora (1772-1784*), though the modern recipes have a number of advantages: the authors have scaled them down to a more manageable amount, and they describe the actual process in more detail. With pictures.

Tallow, mostly without the sheep odor...

One thing I learned, was to soak the tallow in advance to get some of the odor out. I ended up letting it go for two weeks, because even with changing the water regularly the sheep smell wasn't fully dissipating.

Common pomatum.

In lieu of the suggested scents, I decided to experiment a bit, and used both jasmine and neroli. In retrospect, using two florals was not a good choice--I should have used a citrus or a spice oil with one floral to get a more interesting mixture. It's not bad, just a bit boring (and mostly only jasmine).

The finished pomatum is more solid that the versions I've made with beef tallow. It's not quite as hard as the ones with wax added, but you can't just scoop it up in your fingers either. In use, it seems to function no differently from other pomatums I've used.

*At minimum, editions of this book appeared in 1772, 1775, 1779, and 1784.