The Family Bread Recipe - Braided loaves with or without sesame seeds

This is a special recipe that has been in our family (the Sicilian side) for a very long time. It is made with butter and milk, and is brushed with a beaten egg before it is baked, to make it glossy. These particular loaves were transported after being shaped and before baking, so they may look a little mis-shapen, but everyone enjoyed eating them!

I'm hoping to embellish this post with photos on Sunday (done!), when we are planning to bake this bread for the celebration of Grandma's life. In the meantime, I'm posting it here so I can find it more easily. This card would have been written when I was in my twenties, so it's probably been in my recipe box for 40 years.

Note: I remember that Grandma & Grandpa used to buy 1 pound blocks of bakers' yeast somewhere in town, and would cut it up for future use in this recipe. It looked sort of like a pound of butter. That may have been before the dried yeast was so readily available. I have no idea where they got it, but there used to be many more neighborhood bakeries around town.

I should also add that my grandmother (Grandma's mother) used to say that when a girl knew how to bake bread and make spaghetti sauce, she was ready to get married. I think she was married at age 15, soon after arriving from Sicily, so times were different then. See the prior post for the family meat sauce recipe, courtesy of my cousin. Sometime soon I will post the recipe for a simple & quick vegetarian sauce for pasta, which my husband learned from Grandma.

Here's how it looks without seeds and shaped into a round "wreath-shaped" loaf.