Clean Living
In the cheese room of what used to be a dairy farm in Cheselbourne, Dorset, you’ll find curing racks stacked not with hunks of cheddar or Dorset Blue Vinny, but with petal-scattered soap bars, great orange moulding blocks and countless glass bottles of essential oils. Here, whiffs of lavender, geranium, pine and clementine have replaced the more earthy odours of fermentation and cow flank. “Saponification is the name given to the process of soap making,” explains Silvana de Soissons of Farm Soap Co., “and it’s just like cheese making. You’ve got to be very accurate.”
Silvana is no slouch. Hailing from Italy but raised on farms all over Africa, she moved
