Sweet Potato Sonker Is the Southern Dessert You Need to Make

My home state of North Carolina is the sweet potato capital of the United States. In fact, it’s the state vegetable. I didn’t know that little trivia night factoid growing up, but sweet potatoes were on the table almost every Sunday, so I associated them with home.

My maternal grandmother is from Surry County, NC, which happens to be the homeplace of a dessert called the sonker. You often see fruity sonkers filled with berries or apples, but every once in a while you’ll run into sweet potato sonker.

What Is a Sonker?

There’s no standard recipe for sonker. It can be made with a biscuit topping, a cakey topping, or pie dough. What ties all sonker recipes together? In my opinion, it’s geographic location—what would pass for cobbler anywhere else is called sonker in Surry County—and the presence of copious amounts of juice or syrup. Every sonker I’ve had oozes sweetened fruit juices, which makes them a little messier than your standard pie.

Sweet potato sonker has a few defining features: It is most often made with pie dough, complete with a lattice top; it uses cooked and sliced sweet potatoes for the filling; and it is often served with “milk dip,” a sweet, white, pudding-like sauce. Some of the milk dip is poured over the sonker partway through baking, then the finished sonker is served with extra milk dip.

The Process, In a Nutshell

The following recipe looks long, but the process is fairly straightforward. You’ll line a baking dish with pie crust, fill the crust with sliced boiled sweet potatoes and a sugar-molasses mixture, and top the whole thing with a lattice crust (dig deep and remember how to make a basket weave pattern from those preschool arts and crafts days). 

After baking for a while, you’ll pour “milk dip” (a loose vanilla pudding) over the sonker and bake it a little longer. Then, you’ll serve the baked sonker with any remaining milk dip. To shorten the process, you can boil the sweet potatoes up to three days in advance.

Tips for Making Sweet Potato Sonker

• Choose slender spuds: Use slender sweet potatoes so they cook through evenly and at the same rate. Garnet sweet potatoes, which have distinctive dark orange-red skins, are a great choice here, as they’re usually long and skinny and also moist and flavorful for baking.
• Simmer, don’t boil: Don’t boil the sweet potatoes or they’ll fall apart. Adjust the heat to maintain a slow bubble.
• Sorghum or molasses: This recipe calls for molasses because it’s easier to find, but if you live in the South you may be able to find sorghum, a molasses-like syrup made from sorghum cane. It is less bitter than molasses and can have a very light smokiness.
• It’s juicy: The sweet potatoes will be almost submerged in sticky juices when you put the sonker in the oven. This is normal. Remember: you want lots of juice in a sonker!
• Milk dip consistency: The milk dip thickens as it cools. To reheat it before serving, add a splash of milk and cook over medium heat, whisking, to restore its silky texture.