How to Make Appalachian Sweet Bread

in almost every culture in every country every region of the country even all over the world you'll find sweetbread recipes it's like every culture has their own sweetbread recipe appalachia does too when you see the recipe i'm going to show you how to make it today you'll see it's really just a cake it's kind of what it is but growing up a lot of people you'll hear them talk about eating sweet bread they remember their mother or their grandmother or someone making sweet bread and it was a treat that they really looked forward to it's funny how we tie our memories to food of course in the case of sweet bread it was something sweet so something to look forward to probably in a place at least for pap when he told me when there just wasn't many sweets around and when his mother would make sweet bread it was something they all got excited about you know but sometimes those memories is interesting or tied to things that maybe necessarily weren't that good maybe or maybe not that it weren't that good but it was that there wasn't that much there wasn't plenty like we have today we live in the land of plenty in those days when you had sometimes you had you know not much food or had to go without even those kind of make do recipes become really meaningful in people's minds as they look back over their memories of food but today i'm going to show you how to make pap's sweet bread it's funny the day pat showed me how to make sweet bread he had made it lots of times before and i'd tasted it but the day i was i was writing for the blind pig in the acorn and i went down when he was going to make it i said next time you make sweet bread let me come and you can show me how to make it so he did so if you go to the blind pig in the acorn you can see photos of his hands and stuff as he made it but it's funny i wrote down the directions just on a index card that granny had and i guess while he was talking if you look on the back of it when i look on the back of it it's funny i must have wrote this down because he said it and i thought it was funny or memorable or whatever so it says you can hear anything nowadays except me to frying in a pan so i think he was telling me a story about some old man that said that to him how people didn't cook anymore at home which a lot of people do cook we do so i know you may be the same way but there are a lot of people that no longer cook that prefer it's just quicker and easier in their modern day lives to eat out but anyway i thought that was funny i'd wrote that down you can hear anything nowadays except meat frying in a pan so someone had told pap that and he was telling me about it anyway so how we start we have used cast iron pans a lot of times you'll see people with sweet bread recipes and they use loaf pans or even a cake pan or something like that but he used cast iron pans so that's what i do so i've got two um pans so in the cast iron pans pap would put two big spoonfuls of lard and that's tablespoons and i use crisco i don't have real lard but so i've got two and they've melded in each then he took two tablespoons of butter in each pan so i'll go ahead and put that in and let that melt and i need to turn that one i've got two eggs that i've broke in the bowl and i'm going to add the milk one cup of milk to it and just whisk it around start together once this is melded which it pretty much is i'm going to add most of all of the grease to the milk and the egg see pat said he liked doing it like this better because it was just easy it's one less dish to wash instead of melting the butter like in the microwave or in another pan or something like that so you can see i'm going to put it in here now that i've got the butter in i'm going to add a cup of sugar i'm going to also add two teaspoons of vanilla but again pab didn't use actual the teaspoon measure and he just used a teaspoon out of the drawer so that's what i'll do a silver wire teaspoon i should have said and once that's mixed in all i also left is to mix in the flour so pap use self-rising flour he used a cup and a half got it right here [Music] and you just stir it until it's smooth just like you would when you were making any other type of cake and you could use plain flour if you wanted to and add soda and uh sodie as pap and granny call it soda instead of baking soda and baking powder and salt you could do that it'd be just fine and as you can see it's very similar the recipe is to what you would you know a cake recipe a basic cake recipe okay i've about got it smooth if you didn't want to do it by hand you could also use a mixer i just usually mix it up like this but if it's easier definitely use a mixer so now we're gonna divide it between the two hot pans it'll take about 20 to 25 minutes for it to be done you know how to test if a cake's done you can use a toothpick usually it's pulls away from the edges and it's golden brown that's how you would tell but i would just keep a check on it the first time since ovens vary but for me it takes about 20 minutes so i just got the sweet bread out of the oven you can see it made two layers so you could ice it like a cake it's a little thinner than a cake it doesn't rise up as much as normal cake does you could ice it if you wanted to pat the way he liked to eat his is with a can of granny's peaches that she put up in the summer that was his favorite way to eat he is my favorite way is just to cut it right now and eat it i think i'll take one down to granny in a little bit and tell her i made her some of pap's sweet bread i think she'd like that well we were talking a minute ago about when i was talking about the tail i used tablespoons and teaspoons from the silverware instead of actually the measuring spoons of tablespoon or teaspoon made me think of something so in appalachia like this is some people call this a butter knife or uh just a silver wire knife you know it's what you put with your plate but we've always called it a case knife and i didn't think anything about that until i started researching you know i started the blind pig in the acorn and then i come across case knife and i was like what everybody doesn't call that a case knife but apparently not anyway so if i tell somebody to bring me a case knife this is what i want it's a knife like this so you'll be interesting to see do you call this a case knife of course there is the case pocket knife i know about those two my husband carries them and pat carried one too that was their kind of their favorite brand of knives but we also call this a case knife i hope you enjoyed learning about sweet bread and seeing the recipe that pat made and it's really good if you decide to try it i know a lot of older people have those fond memories that i was talking about but i have fond memories of pat making it when i was growing up too so if you haven't subscribed to my channel i hope you will i hope you'll share this video with your friends and neighbors but mostly i just hope you'll drop back by often as i celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 23,825

Rating: 4.988389 out of 5

Keywords: sweet bread recipes, sweet bread loaf, Appalachia, Appalachian Mountians, sweet bread cast iron pan, Appalachian Food, Food from Appalahcia, Appalachian Foodways, vanilla sweet bread recipe, fluffy sweet bread recip, old timey sweet bread, old fashioned sweet bread, Appalachian foods and recipes, Appalachian food history, Appalachian food summit, celebrating appalachia, Blind Pig and The Acorn, Pap

Id: WkxYO7OlAwU

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 05 2020