I don’t speak French, but I know that ‘a la mode’ means ‘in the fashion’. (Pre-hijack: why not ‘de la mode’? As I said, Je ne parle pas français.) So pie a la mode is ‘pie [served] in the fashion [of the times]’, right? And the fashion of the times when ‘pie a la mode’ was… er, fashionable… was pie with ice cream on top.
Only it isn’t the fashion of the times, as far as I know. From what I’ve seen, most people don’t eat pie with ice cream on it. So why do we still call it ‘pie a la mode’? Why don’t we say, ‘He wore a hat a la mode, the feather flashing brightly above the band.’ or ‘He bought an iPod a la mode; that is, with a protective case.’?
Of course. But I don’t think it is ‘fashionable’ in the sense that late-19th or early 20th Century hipsters might say, ‘Let’s go out for pie with ice cream on it! That would be the bee’s knees!’ Fashions change. So why does ‘a la mode’ specifically mean ice cream on pie, we use ‘a la mode’ for other things?
Hockey Monkey: No, he doesn’t have ice cream on his head. In the hat example, the hypothetical fashion is to wear a particularly bright feather in one’s hat band. So a ‘hat a la mode’ would be a hat with such a feather.
Miss Manners said it’s okay to eat ice cream with an ice cream fork. If you’re having pie a la mode (possibly ordering it a la carte), it would seem just the tool for the job.
The thing is, up to a certain time, refrigeration just amounted to a block of ice . . . not controlled enough for restaurants to stock ice cream. But they did have pie. When true refrigeration came about, it became possible to keep things like ice cream, so it quickly became trendy to order one’s pie with a scoop of ice cream.
Perhaps this was the first use of “a la mode,” and people associated the phrase with ice cream. So it took precedence over other possible usages, like “hat a la mode.”
Another translation would be “in style,” in the same way that someone in a limousine might be said to be “traveling in style.” That doesn’t mean it’s the predominant fashion, it just means it’s high living.
It’s a common error for people to translate from one language to another word-for-word. Actually the word à in French is usually translated as “at” or “to” but can also mean “with” in phrases like “au jus” (and don’t get me started on restaurants that serve “roast beef with au jus” :rolleyes:). In a Italian, if you were going to travel to a place, sometimes you would say go “in” (meaning “go in”) or “a” (meaning at or to), depending on the place. Many words are used idiomatically and you just have to learn the usage. English is the same way (“have dinner” actually means “eat dinner,” not just to have it with you) but native speakers don’t even think about this stuff.
Quirks of the language, and what CookingWithGas said about translations. Another example of this is when ordering coffee. If you’re just talking about coffee, it’s le cafe. But if you’re ordering it at a restaurant, it’s du cafe. It’s a difference between saying “the coffee” and “some coffee”.
More likely to be “tarte” than “tourte” (the latter being not much used, a little obsolete, mostly referring to salty dishes).
Anyway, no. I’m not aware of such an use for pies (but it might very well have existed when the word was borrowed). But there are other dishes “a la mode”, or just “mode”. For instance beef. Sometimes, there’s a qualifier, which leads me to suspect that originally it probably referred to the dish being from somewhere (“à la mode de Paris”, “à la mode de chez nous”), the “somewhere” part having been dropped, rather than meaning “currently trendy” (“à la mode” can have both meanings).
However they prepare it. I imagine beef Wellington could be called ‘boeuf à la mode de Wellington’, or a chili size could be called ‘hamburger à la mode de Ptomaine Tommy’.
you get tons of hit, the overwhelming majority being “a la mode de somewhere” : sauted rabbit a la mode de Gairaut, squids a la mode de Genes, crab a la mode de Fecamp, potatoes salad a la mode de Baden, etc…
(“a la mode de chez nous” referring either to the local region or plainly to the restaurant owner’s grandmother)
I dimly recall, from a kid’s book of the 50s, a wiseass kid in the story, having learned that “pie à la mode” meant “pie with ice cream on it”, asked for his dinner meat dish to be served “à la mode”, thinking he’d get ice cream on it, and was quite surprised to find it topped with potatoes, the entire concoction covered with gravy.
(BTW, something that trips up English speakers borrowing a smidgen of French: in this usage, “à la” does not change to a hypothetical à le (or the plurals) to match what follows, the expression “à la Deux Garçons” being construed as a clipping of “à la [mode du Café de] Deux Garcons”.)
However, does anyone know the story behind “veal à la financiere”?
