North Carolina gains meatier culinary trail

The Surry Sonker Trail—which weaves through the hilly northwest corner of the North Carolina Piedmont from bars to bakeries serving sonker, a Surry County cousin to cobbler—has a website, historical marker, and associated festival. Until 2018, it even had an unofficial enforcer.

“We’d go on day trips, and if we were close to such-and-such, we’d go to try their sonker,” said Paul Carter of Rockford General Store in Dobson, the first business to join the tourism initiative unveiled by Surry County in 2015. Carter’s late wife, Carolyn, “would go off on them if they didn’t have it.”