Bear claw: A large sweet pastry shaped like a bear’s paw. It’s usually made with yeast, filled with almond paste and raisins, and glazed with sugar or an egg wash.
Photo and accompanying recipe from Joe Pastry. Danish dough recipe here.
I’ve known these things as “bear claws” since I was a child, but it wasn’t till a couple of weeks ago that I learned that the term bear claw originated right here in the Bay Area. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) gives the citation:
1942 AN&Q 2.55 San Francisco CA, Another variety [of “snail” pastry], with raisin filling, is (from its shape) known as a “bear-claw.”
There’s no further etymology, but it pleases me to think that the pastry was created and named to honor the California state animal, the grizzly bear, or the UC Berkeley Golden Bears across the bay.*
(In the citation, AN&Q stands for American Notes and Queries, a defunct offshoot of Notes and Queries. The parent journal was founded in England in 1849 to publish academic correspondence about folklore and literature. There’s a short but delightful Wikipedia entry about Notes and Queries that includes the journal’s original motto: “When found, make a note of.” The saying was the catchphrase of Captain Cuttle, a character in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son.)
I had found my way to the DARE website because the dictionary has been in the news lately. Next month, with the publication of its fifth and final volume (Sl through Z), DARE will finally be complete—half a century after it was conceived.
In his language column for the Boston Globe, Ben Zimmer described the long process:
When Fred Cassidy, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, was named chief editor of a dictionary project to track American dialects in 1962, he had a faster timetable in mind. The Dictionary of American Regional English began in earnest a few years later, when 80 fieldworkers armed with elaborate questionnaires spread out to more than a thousand communities around the country. Some researchers drove green Dodge vans called “Word Wagons,” equipped with clunky reel-to-reel tape recorders—the better to document every uff-da (a Norwegian exclamation in the Upper Midwest) and pitch-in (an Indiana term for a potluck).
Read more about the DARE Word Wagons here.
DARE is expensive: the list price of Volume V is $85, and earlier volumes go for $89 to $124.50. There are no e-editions, but the publisher, Harvard University Press, is planning to launch an online interactive version in 2013. In the meantime, you can see 100 entries, from “Adam’s housecat” to “sky blue,” on the DARE website, which also publishes a word of the month. This month’s word: “Dick’s hatband.”
Read more about the history of DARE.
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* Do you live outside California and call this pastry something else? Leave a comment here and share it.
"When found, make a note of" is a good motto. But that photo is making me hungry.
Posted by: Stan | February 06, 2012 at 08:14 AM
The same sort of pastry is known in German-speaking countries as Bärentatzen (bear paws). I did a quick Google Books search and couldn't predate your 1942 date in German. Nevertheless, the same term is used in architecture and heraldry (with many earlier hits) to describe the acanthus shape, and I think it's likely that the pastry was modeled after that first, and then, via whimsy or folk etymology grew closer in appearance to real bear claws.
Posted by: H. S. Gudnason | February 07, 2012 at 03:04 AM
I've always known them as bear claws, also, and that's growing up in Chicago and now in Iowa. but I have never seen one so beautifully decorated with almond slices for nails!
Posted by: heydave | February 07, 2012 at 12:19 PM
+1 heydave -- the pastry in the photo looks more like an actual bear, er, paw than anything labeled "bear claw" that I've ever seen in a bakery. The defining characteristic that I've noted is some half-baked (haha) attempt at making "toes" in the pastry, but beyond that, it's often just an oddly-shaped donut.
And this, I can't resist:
>DARE will finally be complete
Which is to say, they'll have finished off the project as originally conceived. Like any dictionary, of course, it will never be complete. :-)
Posted by: mike | February 07, 2012 at 05:08 PM
@Mike: Or as @darewords tweeted on Monday: "Now that we've fulfilled "On to Z" our rallying cry is "On Beyond Zebra!" https://twitter.com/#!/darewords/status/166558897958686724
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | February 08, 2012 at 02:11 PM
Re: DARE, maybe they should have said it will finally be "published" rather than "complete."
Re: Bear claws, guess what's for lunch today?
Posted by: Katy Laundrie | February 10, 2012 at 01:24 PM