Surry Sonker Trail

You’ve heard of a cobbler, but what about a sonker?

Over in Surry County, the home of Mount Airy, which was the real-life inspiration Mayberry from “The Andy Griffith Show,” this pastry tradition has roots that go back to the Scotch-Irish immigrants who began settling in the area in the early 1700s.

Sonker is a deep-dish dessert, often described as a cross between a cobbler and a pie. Unlike those more well-known table standards, sonker is characterized by a soupier consistency and the unshaped dough that caps it. Traditionally, it was a "farm-to-table" frugality dish, created to stretch limited ingredients or use overripe fruit from one of the agricultural community’s many fields or orchards to feed large farming families. The dough is sweetened with sugar, sorghum or molasses, and a “dip” of sweetened cream is often placed on top of the dish before serving.

“The sonker is made out of any kind of fruit that you want to use,” notes a helpful staffer at the Surry County Visitor Center. “I like the blackberry, but I like all of them: apple, blueberry, cherry, grape, peach, pear, raspberry, strawberry, sweet potato.” 

The word itself could be a variation of “sinker,” since the fruit tends to settle toward the bottom of the pan as it bakes. But it’s also believed to come from a Scottish dialect term for a small, grassy knoll or a straw saddle, possibly referring to the bumpy, irregular crust that covers the fruit filling. Some families even claim a lineage for the dish reaching back to a recipe found in Martha Washington’s cookbook.

There’s been an annual Sonker Festival in Surry County since 1980, but in 2015 the county unveiled an official Surry Sonker Trail, which winds through Mount Airy, Elkin, Dobson, and Pilot Mountain and features six different stops at which to gorge upon subtle variations of the sonker. The sonker stop in Dobson takes you to the Harvest Grill in the picturesque Shelton Vineyards. If you make it to Mount Airy and Miss Angels Heavenly Pies, you can try the Zonker of the Day, a spelling variation that also appears there on tempting T-shirts for sale: "I went bonkers eating zonker.”

The entire drive takes about 40 minutes, and there are also the other local culinary attractions unique to the area. These include ground steak sandwich in Mount Airy, which has its own trail, and the surprisingly vast wine of Yadkin Valley, one of the 258 American Viticultural Areas in the country that is home to more than 50 wineries. If you make it to Miss Angels Heavenly Pies, make sure you get a T-shirt that reads “I went bonkers eating Zonka.”