Before modern chemistry, there was alchemy: The semi-mystical practice of manipulating materials to understand their properties, with lofty goals like turning lead into gold or brewing the elixir of life. The Western alchemical tradition began in Alexandria, Egypt in the early first millennium, when Egypt was a Roman province with a long history of Greek influence. There, around the year 300, the alchemist Zosimos wrote the earliest books on alchemy that have survived to this day, with many references to great alchemists who had come before him. One of these was a Jewish woman named Miriam (“Mary,” or “Maria” in Greek), whom Zosimos revered for her wisdom, calling her “the divine Maria” and “one of the sages.” Alchemists deliberately cloaked their work in cryptic symbolism, so Zosimos is vague on details when it comes to these “sages;” he doesn’t even say how long before himself Maria lived. It’s possible that she existed—ancient Alexandria was home to a large Jewish population, and some Alexandrian women did practice alchemy, including Zosimos’s sister—but we can’t say anything about Maria with certainty. Later sources fabricated details to fill in Maria’s biography. She has been described variously as a tutor of Greek philosophers; as a Coptic Christian living in the first century; and as the Biblical Miriam, sister of Moses. According to Zosimos, Maria invented several important early chemistry devices, such as the kerotakis, a high-temperature double boiler used to melt soft metals like copper or lead. The lower pan of the kerotakis contained mercury or sulfur, not water, but the device worked the same as a water bath, by maintaining material in the upper pan at the same temperature as the lower. Zosimos’s claims were accepted and repeated by later alchemists. In the 13th century, the Catalan physician Arnold of Villanova made the first-known reference to a double boiler as “Mary’s bath,” using the Latin balneum Mariae. This was translated by other alchemist-authors into French, Italian, and Arabic. By the 17th century, bain-Marie had become the common term for the kerotakis, as well as for the water bath used in laboratories. From there, the term was applied to the similar water baths used for cooking. As modern science developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, it changed the way that people cooked, and terminology like “bain-Marie” jumped from the laboratory into the kitchen. Some of the early modern food writers who used the term were well-aware that it came from chemistry. An English cookbook from 1818, which described the double boiler as “a mode of cookery that deserves to be more generally employed,” notes that “this in chemical technicals is called Balneum Maris, a Water Bath; in culinary, Bain Marie.” If Maria existed, the culinary water bath may have predated her kerotakis. But over time, it took on the name of her invention for melting metals to discover the elixir of life. Maybe you don’t always feel like a scientist in the kitchen, but next time you use a double boiler, we wouldn’t blame you if you start to feel just a bit like an alchemist. |
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