“We’re only making it official for the All-Clad,” I joked to friends and family at my backyard engagement party on a balmy Midwestern May evening in 2012.
Everybody thinks they need a full cookware set when they get married. I was no exception. I had just turned 30, and though I was getting paid to develop recipes and write about food, I hadn’t really hit my groove as a home cook. Dinner was often a bowl of roasted brussels sprouts and a glass of red wine, and all I really knew was that, like a ring on my finger, a matching set of shiny stainless steel pots and pans would mean I’d accomplished something.
Until then I’d happily made do with a mishmash of hand-me-downs, thrifted pieces, and a 2.75-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven a dear friend gave me before I relocated from Brooklyn to Kansas City. Every piece was useful in some way, and if I ever needed something I didn’t have, I could usually borrow it or find it secondhand.
When my fiancé moved into my apartment, he brought the contents of his kitchen with him: a box of crusty condiment jars, flimsy steak knives we held onto much longer than we should have, and some scratched-to-death nonstick pans. Our combined cookware looked more like a mess than a collection. When we then signed the lease on a little 1920s shirtwaist with a mostly original kitchen and a makeshift pot rack, I was eager for an upgrade. Still, I was careful not to go overboard—just a skillet, sauté pan, and sauce pan from Target’s best Cuisinart line—because everybody knew we were headed for the altar. And, of course, the All-Clad.
Shortly after we got engaged, my betrothed and I walked around the independent kitchen store where I sometimes worked on the weekends, manically jotting down SKUs for gear we couldn’t afford on our own. It was all fun and games until we made our way to the 10-piece set of All-Clad I’d been eyeing for months.
“Who’s going to spend this much money on us?” he asked.
“Someone who knows it’s forever cookware,” I told my forever person while trying to think of a single friend or relative with pockets that deep. “Plus, it can go in the dishwasher!”
Surely sensing the working-class worry in our tone, the shop owner wisely suggested that instead of asking for the set, we register for each piece individually. When our carefully curated lot arrived after the wedding, we arranged and rearranged it on our wonky pot rack, then just gazed at it for a while. It was so pretty, so shiny, and so…out of place in our quirky kitchen. All-Clad hadn’t seemed showy in the Upper East Side townhouse where I used to babysit or all those times PBS let me peek into Ina Garten’s Hamptons home, but juxtaposed with our chipped cabinets and tiled countertops, it looked like our modest rental was trying to play dress-up.
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