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The first printed source mentions a “pie a la mode” served at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. But it doesn’t describe the dish, so we have no idea what the “fashionable” addition was.
The other contender location is Upstate New York, at the now-defunct The Cambridge Hotel in the town of Cambridge, near Glens Falls. (A beautiful period building, the hotel was foreclosed upon in the spring of 2012—after being filmed for an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Hotel Hell.”)
At The Cambridge Hotel
At some point in the 1890s, a guest in the dining room of the Cambridge Hotel, Professor Charles Watson Townsend, ordered a slice of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream.
Apparently, pie served with ice cream was a new concept!
Mrs. Berry Hall, a diner seated next to Townsend, asked what it was called. He said it didn’t have a name, and she promptly dubbed it Pie à la Mode. Townsend liked the name so much he asked for it each day by that name [source].
Townsend subsequently ordered it by that name every day of his stay.
He ordered it by that name at a later visit to the Delmonico Restaurant in New York City. They hadn’t heard of it, of course.
The professor then chastised him. He was quoted as saying, “Do you mean to tell me that so famous an eating place as Delmonico’s has never heard of Pie a la Mode, when the Hotel Cambridge, up in the village of Cambridge, NY serves it every day? Call the manager at once, I demand as good service here as I get in Cambridge.”
Delmonico’s, not wanting to be outshone by any other restaurant, immediately put it on the menu.
The newspapers immediately picked up the story of the dessert, and in short order, it was on menus across the nation [source].
The Cambridge Hotel placed an information folder in each guest room, that included a page entitled “The History of the Pie à la Mode.” Here it is.
Townsend died in 1936 at the age of 87, and his New York Times obituary (which we were unable to access) notes that he “inadvertently originated pie à la mode.” He would have been in his 40’s when he “invented” it.
Apple Pie Trivia
“As American as apple pie” is an oft-heard expression. While Americans love their apple pie, the dish itself isn’t American. Apple pie was long-made in Britain, and variations were made across Europe, wherever apples were grown.
The French had a long investigation of apple growing, and the Norman Conquest of 1066 brought their skills—and many new apple types—to Britain.
There were no apple trees in America before British immigrants brought seeds or rootstock and planted orchards. The first apple orchard on the North American continent was planted in Boston by Reverend William Blaxton in 1625.
Feel free to change the saying to, “As American as apple pie à la mode.”
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