In the Mode

We Americans seem to be the only people who make pie a la mode. Despite the French name, the idea of putting ice cream on pie is unknown in France. The closest you’ll find to it in Europe is the sort of nouvelle cuisine dessert plate that includes a little of everything--tart, ice cream, pastry and fruit.

The phrase means “in style,” and appropriately, because pie a la mode seems to be a relatively recent, or at least a 20th century, fashion. In the first edition of “The Boston Cooking-School Cookbook” (1896), Fannie Farmer gave a number of pie and ice cream recipes but never suggested garnishing the one with the other.

Americans were already serving pie-like desserts like cobbler and pandowdy with cream, though, and doing the same to pie was a natural step. The 1923 edition of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook acknowledged this by suggesting cream on one pie; by the 1930 edition, it was calling for cream on seven.

That same edition included the venerable cookbook’s first deep-dish pie recipes. The Deep Apple Pie concluded with the instruction “Serve with or without vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.” This was Fannie Farmer’s only pie calling for ice cream, but it heralded the age of pie a la mode.

Of course, pie a la mode has nothing to do with beef a la mode, which was popular here and in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a piece of larded meat stewed with vegetables, pot roast fashion.