Gratin

Gratin is a French cooking technique in which a dish is topped with a browned crust, usually made from breadcrumbs, cheese, or egg, and finished under an overhead grill or broiler in a shallow ovenproof dish. It is typically served straight from the vessel it was cooked in. The name comes from the French verb gratter, meaning to scrape, a reference to scraping the finished food from the pan, though the technique itself predates the word's appearance in English in 1846. The technique is most associated with potato preparations such as gratin dauphinois and gratin savoyard, but it is also applied to pasta, seafood, and vegetables, often layered with a bechamel or mornay sauce.