<P> The claim is that while visiting the hotel, Professor Charles Watson Townsend ordered a slice of apple pie with ice cream . When asked by another guest what he called the dish, he replied it had no name . The guest, Mrs. Berry Hall, named it Pie à la Mode . Professor Townsend subsequently ordered it by that name every day during his stay . When he later ordered it by that name at Delmonico's Restaurant in New York City, the waiter answered that he had never heard of it . Prof. Townsend chastised the waiter by stating: </P> <P> Do you mean to tell me that so famous an eating place as Delmonico's has never heard of Pie à 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 serve (sic) here as I get in Cambridge . </P> <P> The manager, when called by the waiter, declared "Delmonico's never intends that any other shall get ahead of it...Forthwith, pie à la mode will be featured on the menu every day". A reporter for the New York Sun newspaper overheard the disturbance and wrote an article about it the next day . Soon, Pie à la Mode became a standard on menus around the United States . </P> <P> When Charles Watson Townsend, died on May 20, 1936, a controversy developed as to who really invented Pie à la Mode . The New York Times reported that "Pie à la Mode" was first invented by Townsend at the Cambridge Hotel in Cambridge, New York in the late 1800s . It was later reported by several sources that Townsend ordered pie and ice cream at the Cambridge Hotel in 1896, and thus invented the dessert . The legend also states that a reporter from The Sun newspaper in New York overheard a conversation between the manager of Delmonico's Restaurant and Charles Townsend . The reporter was said to have written about the incident in the very next issue of The Sun . </P>

Where did the term a la mode come from