THE CHALLENGE: Try a recipe that calls for "sweet milk" as in the 1870s recipe, Washington Pie, and use unsalted whole milk first for the sweet milk. Try the recipe again, this time using sweetened condensed milk.

Washington Pie.

1 cup of sugar

1/3 cup of butter

1/2 cup of sweet milk

1 and 1/3 cup of flour

1 egg

1/2 teaspoonful of soda

1 of cream of tartar

lemon flavor

Grease 2 round tins, and put in the above. Bake until done. Then put it on a dinner plate, spread with nice apple-sauce, or sauce of any kind; then another layer of cake on top. It is nice without sauce, but sauce improves it.

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To Recipe-Hunter & Quattroventi:

Almost nothing annoys me more than when you are looking for specific help...you ask a specific question, and you get a myriad of random responses, none of which answers your question.  I too am in search the definition of "Sweet Milk."  This is the best I have come up with: 

Sweet milk is an expression that means fresh milk. It means not spoiled, sour, or decaying; fresh: sweet milk. Whole milk works the best !!

Re. sweet milk, my teacher's history resource book (I'm based in Ireland)  explains exactly what you have already been told! It's regular, ordinary milk: This would have been more of a treat in old days, when buttermilk was the norm, being thinner, therefore cheaper to buy.

The children's history textbook had a printed passage written by a man who lived on the outskirts of Dublin about 150 years ago. In it, he described his typical diet. Sweet milk was one of the few foods he had access to. (But he did manage a cup of tea on a Sunday! Which was considered a real treat, even though he didn't really like the taste!)

  As Dublin was under British rule at the time, and was geographically close, it would have been typically victorian in many ways, (but not all!). Therefore you can be fairly certain that the sweet milk referred to in your recipes really does mean what you have taken it to mean: this man was english-speaking, so the term should have held the same meaning as it did across the water in England!

Hey, Pamela,

I thought I had solved it, but you're throwing the cat amongst the pigeons! Is your recipe going back to victorian times too?????

I have this wonderful recipe, I am told. But it also calls for sweet milk, I have tried it twice with sweetened condensed milk and it is clearly not the correct sweet milk I am looking for. Since it is an old southern recipe I will go with whole milk. Buttermilk is also in the recipe. Thanks everyone for clearing up my problem.

I just searched sweet milk because I have a recipe for Chocolate Drop cookies from my mom that calls for sweet milk.  I am one of the few lucky ones who still has access to fresh whole milk!  My husband is a dairy farmer and I will be able to get milk straight from the milk tank tonight to make these cookies for my husbands Valentines Day gift!  Thanks! 

My grandmother used to use "top milk" which was actually just cream, but while studying online, I read that human breast milk was referred to as "sweet milk".  It may be that breastmilk was used in recipes back then?  There was not the huge stigma against it back then and was used for all types of people from children to sick people.  Maybe where the term "Nurse" came from?  As for the recipe, it makes a lot of sense when you think about what was available to them, especially since refridgeration was an issue.

All true Southerners that aint from the city knows that "sweet milk" is just regular whole milk. Because they drinked buttermilk and regular milk, so they called it sweet milk. In the mountains of Ga we still call it sweet milk.