They used to be made in what Southern country cooks called bread pans. Most people seem to agree that the essential characteristics of sonkers are these: They are juicier than cobblers. “They were for people who lived out in the country,” Ms. “So a cobbler is biscuit dough on fruit goo or modern cake batter on fruit goo? Anything goes? Wrong, wrong, wrong!” said Nancie McDermott, a North Carolina cookbook author and food historian. At countless barbecue joints across the South, cobbler is often nothing more than overly sweet canned peaches baked in a hotel pan with commercial cake mix. In parts of Alabama and Louisiana, a cobbler is always topped with biscuit dough. “It was that cuppa cuppa cuppa thing that turned into a cake,” she said, referencing an easily remembered formula based on equal parts of milk, self-rising flour and sugar.Įdna Lewis, the careful cook from Virginia whose books are considered definitive tomes in the Southern culinary canon, often suggested a lattice top on her peach cobbler, with bits of raw dough tucked into the filling before baking. She is from Macon County, deep in South Georgia, where the start of peach season was so important that school administrators planned spring break around it. “I grew up with a batter cobbler,” said Virginia Willis, the Southern chef and cookbook author. But what is a cobbler, really? Is it the freewheeling cousin of the crisp? The Southern answer to the thrifty New England brown Betty? A pan dowdy with integrity? A pie for lazy people? Like the many other players in the loose-knit team of dishes based on cooked fruit and bread, it began as a way to stretch fruit that was perhaps past its glory or make use of economical fillings like wild blackberries.Ī 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, and easier to serve to a crowd.Īt this point, the astute reader is probably thinking this sounds like a cobbler with a funny name. 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 as elusive as that white whale.Ī big, deep, soupy mess of warm fruit or soft sweet potato, the sonker was made to feed everyone who happened to be working at the farm on any given summer day. The dessert is baked nowhere else in the nation. I came here to Surry County, where the cooking has Appalachian roots and the Blue Ridge Mountains are a short drive away, in search of the sonker. Nashville Kat, who is an amazing cook in her own right and recently released a cookbook called The Happy Husband's Cookbook, called in to tell us about a couple of recipes she nabbed from Miranda Lambert. Now before we find out for sure, I think I have to tell you how all this came about. Stir and bake in a hot oven until golden brown and bubbly." So, Thursday morning on the WBKR Waking Crew, Nashville Kat, Moon and I wondered. It's just a cup of flour, a cup of sugar and a cup of fruit cocktail with the syrup. Olympia Dukakis' character, Clairee, wants Truvy to give her the recipe and Truvy says, "You don't need a recipe. Dolly Parton played a hairdresser named Truvy and, at a certain point in the film, she gets asked about one of her famous recipes. Do you remember the movie Steel Magnolias? I'm sure you do.
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