Escaloped

Part of speech: adjective, verb

Definitions

1. Baked in a dish with layers of sliced food, such as potatoes, under a sauce and breadcrumbs ; cut or shaped into a series of rounded curves along an edge
2. Prepared in a casserole of thin slices layered with a creamy sauce and crumbs ; having a decorative edge made of repeated small rounded arcs
3. Describing a dish baked with alternating layers and a sauce topping ; describing an edge or border cut into a row of shallow, rounded curves

Etymology: "Escaloped" is the older spelling of "scalloped," and it describes food baked in layers, most often potatoes sliced thin and baked with cream or sauce. The word's history is tied to the scallop shell, which has long been used as a model for scalloped edges and patterns. The shell's fan shape and ridged surface gave rise to the verb "escallop," meaning to decorate an edge with a series of curved notches, and the cooking sense grew out of the same shape: layers arranged overlapping one another like the ridges of a shell. The form "escaloped" is simply the past participle and adjective formed from "escalop" with the regular "-ed" ending, so it describes something that has been given that treatment. Here the word is shaped by the dish's layering rather than by any notched edge, which is why the spelling with a single "l" and an "o" survived in older cookery writing.