There's a festival for it near Mount Airy, northwest of Winston-Salem. Has been for years.

After living and eating in North Carolina since the age of 3, I thought I knew about what people in this state liked to cook. But there are always surprises, and one is sonker.

Turns out sonker is one of a collection of odd terms -- grunt, slump, buckle, betty, cobbler -- for variations on the fruit-and-batter-dessert theme. The name, so far as I can tell, is unique to the Surry County area.

But connoisseurs of sonker believe it is different, and far better, than its similar sisters.

I asked a friend, whose parents grew up in Mount Airy, if she knew about sonker. Her eyes lit up and she bounced in her chair (surprising, since she's not prone to extroverted outbursts of enthusiasm; sonker must inspire such behavior). She remembered eating her aunt's sonker on visits to Mount Airy. What she liked about it was that it was more fruit than dough or batter. Most cobblers, she sniffed, don't have enough fruit for her taste.

I know what she means. I was raised in a family that was miserly with the fruit in cobblers. Both my grandmother, who was a meticulous and good cook, and my mother, who seldom made desserts, produced cobblers with a batter-to-fruit ratio of about 3-to-1. Sometimes, I'd swear that was just orange food coloring in my bite of peach cobbler.

I broke the cycle. I use the same easy recipe they did, but double or triple the fruit. Heck, I don't even really measure it. The result is a molten slurry of blueberries, blackberries or peaches (sometimes a combination) held together by a minimal amount of sweet, cakelike dough.

So, if a lot of fruit is key to sonker, maybe I've been making it all along.

Cama Merritt, who has worked with the Sonker Festival in Lowgap for many years, says that even in the heart of sonker country, there are a lot of opinions about what constitutes the dish. The festival, which includes daylong performances of bluegrass music, is held on the first Saturday in October. Proceeds go to the upkeep of Lowgap's historic Edwards-Franklin House.

"There's one where you make regular pie crust dough and make it like a deep-dish pie. Sometimes, there are strips of dough in it that come out like dumplings. An old traditional one is to take old biscuits, crumble them up and put them in with juicy fruit like blackberries so the biscuits soak up the juice," she says. "It's taking what you had and making a dessert out of it."

I figured that if any cooking reference book contained information about sonker, it would be "North Carolina and Old Salem Cookery" by Beth Tartan.

Beth Tartan was the name under which Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks wrote as food editor for the Winston-Salem Journal from 1948 through 1991, which included my growing-up years in Winston-Salem. She was part of that generation of food editors who produced recipes and sections that were firmly rooted in the Betty Crocker era, when the kitchen was the domain of the woman of the house -- and was the only place where women ruled.

During that time, there were also variations of Beth Tartan on TV, demonstrating family-pleasing recipes while wearing fluffy skirts, but showing that they had solid cooking knowledge (no perky chicks opening jars of salsa).

Everything about food sections and magazines has changed since then -- rightfully and thankfully so. But there's one thing that those of Beth Tartan's generation had that's hard to replace: The knowledge of food that comes from a lifetime spent in a particular place. It still takes study and an open mind as well to understand a region and its food, but if you know and love an area, that's a head start.

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