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The cobbler-like dessert, unique to one mountain county, saves on both time and ingredients in delivering distinct flavors with ties to both the British Isles and Africa.
Tourism Partnership of Surry County
Sonker. As I type the word, my computer inserts a bold red underline, that glaring signal of unfamiliarity. Even some of the most highly regarded books on foods of the American South ignore sonker completely. A mention of the word just 100 miles beyond Surry County, North Carolina, typically elicits blank stares and furrowed brows.
The venerable “Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets” does acknowledge sonker’s existence, with a six-line entry. Cobbler gets three times that much space.
Obscurity, in this case, may be a virtue. Every Cracker Barrel in America serves fruit cobbler. None of them serves sonker and likely never will. Sonker’s identity is local. The cobbler-like dessert was born out of necessity and poverty.
As Sandra Johnson at Mount Airy, North Carolina’s Down Home Restaurant puts it, “Sonker is a hard-times dish. It contains no eggs, which were scarce. All it takes is fruit, a little bit of sugar, and biscuit dough.” Johnson says three-quarters of a cup of sugar will sweeten a good-sized sonker.
Sonker was not only a way to get as much goodness as possible out of limited ingredients, it was also a way to conserve time.
“As times modernized and women went to work in the factories and mills, meal preparation at night had to be quicker,” Johnson says. She knows that firsthand. Her father, Jonah Boyd, worked in a furniture factory while her mother, Agnes, made sweaters for Pine State Knitwear.
“My mama would keep sonker on the stove, and as the fruit boiled, she’d drop little dumplings in it, and on top she’d put a smooth layer of her dough bread. Then she’d put it in the oven to brown it up real good.”
Johnson calculates that a sonker can be made from scratch in less than 45 minutes, and that time even includes the peeling of the peaches. Or, more often, the peeling of sweet potatoes. She says sweet potato sonker is her favorite, and Surry County historian Marion Venable agrees. “Sweet potatoes are the queen of sonker,” Venable tells us.
Venable interviewed members of home demonstration clubs in the late 1970s and collected their recipes in a booklet, first printed in 1980. My copy is dated 2013, the year of the 34th Annual Sonker Festival. The event continues to be held, on the first Saturday in October at the 1799 Edwards-Franklin House in the western part of Surry County. The first five recipes in the booklet are for sweet potato sonker. Venable says most of the contributors to the recipe collection are now deceased.
Mrs. C.L. Eads of Mount Airy put a little vinegar in her sweet potato sonker. Madge Gunnell of Ararat added cinnamon and nutmeg. Mrs. Gib Wolfe of Dobson only used sweet potatoes, butter, vanilla and sugar for her filling.
Dough-to-filling ratios and the placement of the dough itself can vary from home to home. Many sonker bakers line the bottoms and sides of their metal pans with dough. Some add a top crust.
“But I think you can have too much bread,” Marion Venable says. “I put strips of crust on the bottom and sides, then add my fruit and sugar, and put strips of dough across the top, like a lattice-work pie.”