Four to five times a week, I reach into the cabinet to the left of my stove and pull out my ugliest, least-pedigreed pan. Actually, it’s two pans: a double boiler. The bottom is scuffed and darkened from decades of use; the insert, which is never meant to come directly in contact with heat, has swollen because someone who prefers not to be named put it directly on the burner.

No one else seems to consider a double boiler an essential piece of equipment. You won’t find it on the lists compiled by even the most down-to-earth food writers. I can’t recall the last time I saw one mentioned in a recipe. Yet it’s essential to me, because I’m a work-at-home writer who likes to reheat leftovers for lunch and make brownies on the spur of the moment. (Every work-at-home writer needs a way to procrastinate; mine is baking, although cleaning the baseboards with a Q-tip will also do in a pinch.)

Reheating leftovers in a double boiler produces a superior, if slower, result when compared with food heated in a microwave. I have met people who want to argue this point, who claim that my taste buds couldn’t possibly tell the difference, but you don’t actually need a great palate to find the dead, cold spots in leftovers that have been microwaved. And while a double boiler takes longer, it requires virtually no oversight. It’s hard to burn something — unless, ahem, you put the insert directly on an open flame.

Yet the thing I most appreciate is that a double boiler is not a microwave. I hate microwaves. I didn’t grow up with one, and I’m not going to grow old with one. In that way, I am channeling my late father, who was highly skeptical of many things.