Sweet milk
By DAN LANGFORD
Eating breakfast out with my wife and boys the other Saturday, the young waitress began by taking our drink orders. The fellows ordered orange juice, my wife ordered coffee with cream, and I ordered my usual breakfast beverage — sweet milk, which I pour myself at home and seldom need to say aloud. The waitress looked puzzled, and asked if I wanted condensed milk. “No, ma’am,” I told her. “Just plain old sweet milk — plain milk, if you will — skim, if you have it.” My boys were hiding under the table by this point, I was embarrassing them so badly; and my country-bred wife reminded me gently after the waitress taken our order in that nobody younger than about forty has any idea what sweet milk is.
That’s a shame. In the South, buttermilk is (or at least used to be) considered a delicacy. The late humorist, Lewis Grizzard, reported that his father said he was convinced a good glass of buttermilk would heal the sick and raise the dead. I agree completely. My wife likes to eat cornbread in buttermilk (I prefer sweetmilk for that particular pleasure myself), but our kids can’t stand the stuff. I suspect most younger folks can’t, which explains why “sweet milk” is no longer in the lexicon. That term was used to differentiate plain old milk from buttermilk in a day when every Southern refrigerator (or “icebox,” as folks of my grandmother’s generation called their Fridigaires) held a container of both.
Drinking buttermilk has gone the way of the Edsel, and with it, the need for the good old Southern term “sweet milk.” I guess that’s life, but I’m going to continue to say it, if for no other reason than to fulfill my duty as a parent to embarrass my teenagers.