While watching an old Loony Toons cartoon on DVD, I re-noticed the use of alum as a plot device (I’d say alum was a close second to anvils in these cartoons). Sylvester kept singing and keeping Elmer awake and so Elmer mixed some alum into some cat food whereupon Sylvester unknowingly consumed the alum and proceeded to get a shrill voice and small head.
Okay, so just how common was alum in the usual household? Does anyone still use alum today? Has anyone here actually tasted pure, straight alum? What was it like?
I read the wiki article on alum, but it mainly talks about the various types of alum. I am assuming household alum that you’d find in your cupboard would be the kind used for pickling or soda alum. Any information on this (it’s bugged me for years) would be appreciated.
Aluminum sulfate is commonly referred to as alum in the water treatment industry. It is a flocculating agent, which causes particles in suspension to stick together and form heavier particles (floc) which can be subsequently removed in a settling tank or by filtration.
It can be used as a home remedy for canker sores as well. (Ouch!) Can’t it also be used as a meat tenderizer, or am I thinking of another white powder used for that? ETA: It is sold in the spice aisle, for home pickling I do believe.
Ah, and alum is a necessary ingredient in styptic pencils, which are handy to have for camping or hiking, especially in certain areas where you are at increased risk of infection from bleeding wounds.
Alum is used as a mordant (dye fixative) for wool and fabric. Not that dyeing cloth and yarn at home has ever been exactly an everyday thing for everyone, but it’s never completely disappeared and it’s one of the reasons alum has been available for sale.
I used to grow giant crystals of it when I was a kid - add as much alum powder as you could to a jamjar of just boiled water, hang a thread in it and wait!
I did in fact find some in my parents kitchen when I was a kid, and I tasted a bit. It puckered me up like nobody’s business. It’s been many years, but it was like eating a lemon, but was bitter instead of sour.
More or less. The idea is that really hot water can hold a certain amount of solute, and when you can’t dissolve any more the solution is “saturated”. If you then carefully allow it to cool you have a “supersaturated” solution - the solute/solvent ratio is higher than you could have achieved by dissolving alum in water at that temperature. It’s just dying to crystallize out and if you give it a “seed” such as a single grain or a knot in a piece of thread, off it goes.
Sodium thiosulphate, Na[sub]2[/sub]S[sub]2[/sub]O[sub]3[/sub], will, IIRC, do something even more fun - prepare your supersaturated solution, and when it’s cold, give the jar a tap. The solution will recrystallise in moments.
I have some aluminum sulfate alum in the kitchen cabinet, and I just pulled it out and tasted some. It’s a strange combo of sour with a bitter aftertaste, and it does something to your saliva (denatures the proteins?) such that your mouth isn’t slippery anymore. I won’t be trying that again. It is not at all ‘salty’.
eta: I think it was more common to have in the house when people did more canning - it preserves the color and crispness of pickled foods. I use it to make sizing for paper; my wife uses it for dying yarn.
All the kitchens that had housewives pickling had some. It went in the brine soak, and was not put into the pickling solution. Canning and the like tappered off dramaticaly after the 70’s around here. I have some in my kitchen supplies, but haven’t used it in about 8 years. It wa good for a trick on the siblings, but only worked once for each. It severly puckers one’s mouth with a touch of it to the tongue. All you had to do was touch the alum with your finger and the film that clung to the finger was enough to pucker a mouth. It could be dangerous in amounts larger than a taste so don’t mix it in with a something that people would drink.
I’m presently using an antiperspirant from Thailand that is a single, huge crystal of alum. The one I have is in a bottle with a screw-on top but a lot of the Thais just use a giant crystal of the stuff. My wife had one once that looked a bit decorative sitting in the bathroom.
FTR, it works reasonably well.
you could buy it in the pharmacy in the '70s. As I recall, it was sold as a mouthwash (?). I do recall the label cautioning you not to use it too much “as alum has an undesirable effect on the teeth”
So are we all talking about the same compound? I mean, stiptik pencils, pickling additive, deoderant? I was mainly curious about the kind you’d find in a kitchen cabinet, which is where they usually find it in cartoons. I think I saw it in a Little Rascals’ short too once.
Or is it different compounds all going by the name “alum” because they contain alum in them?
ETA: It is sold in the spice aisle, for home pickling I do believe.