the.com/water bath

means A cooking technique where a dish sits in a pan of hot water (often inside the oven) so it's heated gently and evenly, used for custards, cheesecakes, and other delicate things that curdle or crack under direct heat.

from A straightforward descriptive compound — water + bath, the item literally bathing in water — but it carries a famous alias: 'bain-marie,' the French name, is said to trace back to Mary (Maria) the alchemist, an ancient figure credited with inventing a gentle double-boiler apparatus for slow heating. That attribution is legendary rather than verified, but the technique itself is old, used for centuries wherever heat needed to be gentled rather than blasted.