Soap The Serail

This guide to Soap The Serail in Marseille walks through the two-week process of cooking olive oil, soda ash and sea water in copper cauldrons big enough to hold twenty tons, and the master soap maker's old-fashioned way of judging when the chemistry is done. It traces the works back to Vincent Boetto, who returned to Marseille in 1945 after wartime deportation to Germany and set up cauldrons here in 1949 to keep a fading craft alive, one of roughly a hundred twenty soap works once working the city.