Pictured on the right is a bain-marie. It's a heated bath, a type of a cooking pot for delicate foods like sauces or chocolate. Heat is applied indirectly through steam. It can be used for cheesecakes, flan, creme brulee... Our mouths water just thinking about the possibilities.

"Bain" just means "bath" in French, and "marie" means, well, Mary, so "bain-marie" is "Mary's bath". The bath part is obvious, but Mary somehow refers to Mary the Jewess, an alchemist from a long, long time ago.

(Before we get to the Jewess, can we just complain how every single woman from a "long, long time ago" is called Mary? What, there were no other good names back in the day? Or did the goyim who wrote down these stories truly lack imagination? We know what we're betting on!)

In any case, Mary the Jewess lived in probably Alexandria, sometime between the first and third centuries CE. Some consider her "the first true alchemist of the Western world". We're not sure if she ever created gold (seems rather unlikely with the absence of a nuclear reactor), but annals tell of her producing a purple pigment.

Whatever Mary's prowess was, her name lives on through this double boiler apparatus that she supposedly used.

Is it dessert time yet?