Can you savor a ‘sonker’ stuffed with sweet potatoes?

Surry County, N.C., is world-famous for its fruit-filled sonker desserts, but the true specialty of local homemakers and bakers here is a sonker stuffed with sweet potatoes.

 

Fred Sauceman, a historian affiliated with East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tenn., specializes in Appalachian studies. “Even some of the most highly regarded books on foods of the American South ignore sonker completely,” he said. 

Sonkers are kin to cobblers and deep-dish pies. 

The sweet potato variety of sonkers is even more obscure, but it’s perfectly logical, when you think about it. The sweet potato is North Carolina’s “official state vegetable.” The Old North State is the largest producer of sweet potatoes in the entire United States.

 

Home gardeners in Surry County were quick to pick up on the fact that “the large, starchy sweet potato tubers that form underground” can be prepared in a variety of ways.” The sweet potato is also good for you, high in vitamins A and C and low in fat. 

Jenni Field of Garner, N.C., has totally bought in. She is the creator of “Pastry Chef Online.” She walks and talks her readers through the entire process of how to make delicious sweet potato sonkers.

She prefers using thin slices of boiled sweet potatoes, rather than mashing them. Her recipe calls for sorghum syrup, extra butter and brown sugar. 

The “milk drip” is the special added touch. “It’s a simple mixture of milk, flour or cornstarch, sugar and a pinch of salt that you bring to a boil, so it thickens. Then add some vanilla,” Field said. 

“Folks in Surry County serve milk dip particularly with sweet potato sonkers,” she said, “but I like it so much, I make it for pretty much all sonker flavors.” 

Carolina Country magazine, published by North Carolina’s electric cooperatives, shared a recipe submitted by Lorene Moore of Dobson in Surry County. To simplify, she suggested substituting a store-bought refrigerated dough for the crust – “Pillsbury Grands! Southern Homestyle Biscuits.” 

Imagine the excitement that occurred in Surry County in 2013, when the “sonker crowd” learned that Kim Severson, national food correspondent at The New York Times, was coming up from Atlanta in search of sonkers.

“The dessert is baked nowhere else in the nation,” Severson said. “But as I tried to get to the bottom of what makes a sonker a sonker, I realized that, as with so many country recipes, definitive answers are elusive.” 

“The sonker…began as a way to stretch fruit that was perhaps past its glory or make use of economical fillings like wild blackberries,” Severson said. She joked that one of her friends called the sonker “a ‘Hail Mary’ for dying fruit.” 

“A big pan of sonker was easy to haul to the church supper or the event in the South known as the ‘covered dish.’ It is less fussy than a traditional round pie.” 

In the end, Severson came up with this definition for her readers: A sonker is: “a soupy, deep-dish baked dessert of sweet potatoes or fruit topped with a crust or a batter. You might have a hard time distinguishing it from a cobbler unless you grew up there.”

 

One who did is Alma Venable, who runs the Mayberry Motor Inn, a 27-unit motel in Mount Airy. She set Severson straight: “You have the violin and you have the fiddle,” she said. “The sonker is the fiddle.”