While “a la mode” commonly means topped with ice cream in modern recipes, early cookbooks often used the term to describe a method of cooking beef by larding it and braising it with vegetables and herbs. This recipe for “whale a la mode” comes from a United Statues Bureau of Fisheries published in 1918. The report offers several recipes using whale and porpoise meat instead of beef and suggests that food production may become the future of the declining whale fishery.
Recipe from Whales and porpoises as food by Lewis Radcliffe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1918)
