Your compiler recalls eating breakfast out with his wife and sons one Saturday close to twenty years ago, when the boys were teens still embarrassed by their parents. The young waitress began by taking beverage orders.  The knot-heads ordered orange juice, the lady of the party ordered coffee with half-and-half, and your compiler ordered his usual breakfast beverage – sweet milk – which he pours for himself at home and seldom needs to say aloud.   The waitress – and this was at Waffle House, that bastion of Southern short-order cuisine – looked puzzled and asked if he wanted condensed milk.

     “No, ma’am,” he told her.  “Just plain old sweet milk – plain milk, if you will – skim if you have it.”  His boys were hiding under the table by this point, he was embarrassing them so badly, and his lovely wife reminded him gently after the waitress had taken their order that no one younger than about forty (today it would be close to  sixty) has any idea what sweet milk is.

     That’s a sho-nuff shame!  In the South, buttermilk is (or at least used to be) considered a delicacy.  The late humorist Lewis Grizzard (1946-1994) remembered that his father loved nothing more than a cold, fresh glass of buttermilk, which he was convinced was so good it would heal the sick and near-about raise the dead, a sentiment with which your compiler fully concurs.

      Your compiler’s Carolina-born wife grew up eating cornbread crumbled into a glass of buttermilk and eaten with a spoon, and your compiler is aware of several Georgia-raised folks who love this combination.  Your compiler prefers sweet milk for that particular pleasure, himself, but at least once per quarter will buy a quart of buttermilk and enjoy a glass or two by itself.  But his sons cannot stand the stuff – in any form – and perhaps there lies the explanation for the demise of the term, “sweet milk.”

      For you see, back in the day, there were three kinds of milk on the farm – sweet milk, buttermilk, and what was often called “Blue John.”  Blue John today is known as “skim milk” and in fact is your compiler’s normal milk type today, but back on the farm Blue John was perhaps most often fed to the hogs.  So there was a need to differentiate between the two types of milk left for human consumption – buttermilk and sweet milk.

     Now that few folks enjoy buttermilk any longer, there is really no need for the “sweet milk” appellation, which is probably why it has died out.   That is progress, your compiler surmises, and he supposes he had better learn to accept it.

      But he doesn’t have to learn to like it.  In fact, he will probably continue to say, “sweet milk,” just because it suits him to.  And he may even try it out soon on his sons, who are both in their thirties now, to see if it still embarrasses them, for he sees the causation of occasional embarrassment in his offspring as an critical component of fatherhood’s responsibilities.