Photo illustration by Dana Davis/NYT Wirecutter; source photos by Lauren Sullivan/NYT Wirecutter
Lauren Sullivan is an editor at Wirecutter. She loves any smart tip that makes parenting less of a slog.
About a dozen years ago, I put about a dozen items on my wedding registry. I remember making the wish list, thinking how bizarre it was to ask loved ones to give my boyfriend and me spatulas, sheets, and vacuums. After all, we’d lived an entire decade as competent pseudo-adults.
Why did our engagement make us second-guess our current spatula, which for years had made fried eggs perfectly well? Why did betrothed households require Williams Sonoma? The registry tradition puzzled me.
As a gift-giver, I’…
Photo illustration by Dana Davis/NYT Wirecutter; source photos by Lauren Sullivan/NYT Wirecutter
Lauren Sullivan is an editor at Wirecutter. She loves any smart tip that makes parenting less of a slog.
About a dozen years ago, I put about a dozen items on my wedding registry. I remember making the wish list, thinking how bizarre it was to ask loved ones to give my boyfriend and me spatulas, sheets, and vacuums. After all, we’d lived an entire decade as competent pseudo-adults.
Why did our engagement make us second-guess our current spatula, which for years had made fried eggs perfectly well? Why did betrothed households require Williams Sonoma? The registry tradition puzzled me.
As a gift-giver, I’ve dodged the spatula skepticism — and the entire registry situation — by giving couples cash. But when faced with the dizzying advice after my engagement (“You have to have a registry, otherwise people are going to get you things you don’t want.”), I hopped on Amazon and took the plunge.
My fiancé and I chose a handful of items that felt like a real splurge — things that, in our combined 20 years of living with low-paying jobs and high-interest student loans, we hadn’t managed to indulge in.
Looking back, I can’t remember any of those splurges except for one: the All-Clad D3 Tri-Ply Stainless Steel 10-Piece Set.
Upgrade pick
My husband’s aunt gave us the incredibly generous $700 set on behalf of her entire family, which included three of our cousins. It was an excellent group gift — exactly the equation that made me feel all gratitude and no guilt about the price tag.
The 10-piece collection (actually more like a six-piece set, since it counts the lids, which I think is a stretch) has been Wirecutter’s upgrade pick for cookware sets since 2017, and it immediately upped the caliber of our kitchen. And 11 years of marriage — and dinner parties and quarantines and toddler birthday brunches — later, each pot, pan, and lid is as good as new.
I can actually mark milestones of our marriage in dishes made in our All-Clad set.
Year 1: Staten Island Sunday Sauce
My Sunday Sauce simmering in the stockpot. It was never quite as good as Mimi’s — but close. Source photos by Lauren Sullivan/NYT Wirecutter
My friend Bronwyn invited us out to her parents’ house in Staten Island for her mother’s classic Sunday Italian dinner — served promptly at lunchtime.
It was momentous for two reasons: My new husband was meeting my friends’ parents, and we’d stepped into another orbit of understanding the people who made us people. But also: We discovered Mimi’s Sunday Sauce, which hinged on a secret ingredient of carrots — carrots! — blended thoughtfully with canned tomatoes.
I’d spend the next year trying to re-create the dish every Sunday. Just a Jewish boy and an Irish girl sitting down for Sunday Sauce. I got it to a good place after trying different kinds of meatballs — turkey, baked, ricotta, three-meat, over-parsleyed, under-parsleyed — but it was never as good as Mimi’s.
Year 2: When a gas leak left us stoveless for six months
The flashing lights from the street lasted an entire day and ended with a note tacked to our door: “There has been a gas leak detected in one of your neighbor’s apartments. As a result, we’re turning off gas to the entire building. More information soon.”
There was very little “more information,” and it definitely didn’t come “soon.” We had no access to our gas stove for a weekend, then a month, then a season. As we protested our rent dues alongside furious neighbors, we became experts in cooking on a countertop electric burner.
I can’t remember any specific dishes we made, but I do remember trying to make a casserole on the burner in our Pyrex baking dish. It shattered into a million pieces. Our All-Clad lived on.
Year 3: Hosting Thanksgiving, with Mommom’s stuffing
The 3-quart sauce pan is the right size for my grandma’s bland-but-memorable stuffing recipe. Source photos by Lauren Sullivan/NYT Wirecutter
My grandmother raised 11 children, earned her college degree at age 56, spent the later years of her life caring for others as a visiting nurse — and was a terrible cook.
She somehow managed to butcher meatloaf. I lived with her for the first nine years of my life, and I can’t remember a single dish fondly — just chewing her overcooked pork chop until my jaw hurt, and watching my uncle fold her overdone green beans into mashed potatoes to help get them down.
Her Thanksgiving dinner consisted of packaged rolls, canned cranberry sauce, and dried-out turkey. But her stuffing — made with a loaf of Wonder bread, one stick of butter, onion, celery, and thyme — is a bite that takes me back every Thanksgiving.
I hosted my first Thanksgiving — a big step in my marriage and in-law relationship — by going all in with NYT Cooking recipes like Mark Bittman’s Brussels Sprouts With Garlic and Melissa Clark’s Simple Roast Turkey. But I never wavered on the stuffing. It could only ever be Mommom’s mediocre-but-perfect recipe.
Year 5: When I joined the rest of the internet in a Bon Appétit obsession
There was a glorious time — before the details of pay disparity and upsetting employee grievances came to light — when Bon Appétit’s YouTube channel was on my must-watch list. My husband would scoff whenever Molly Baz was on the TV instead of his dear Baltimore Orioles.
My favorite chef-personality was always Carla Lalli Music, whose recipes, humor, and name brought me utter joy. Even when she was making her colleagues’ recipes for the feed — like Claire Saffitz’s Salted Caramel-Chocolate Tart, a dessert that would torpedo my toddler son into pastry obsession — Carla made it look easy and fun.
It was Carla’s Pasta e Fagioli recipe (which introduced me to the importance of soffritto and the virtue of ham hocks) that finally dethroned my Staten Island Sauce on Sundays.
Year 7: Quarantining with lukewarm coffee
As it is for millions of people, 2020 is a blur. Our second kid turned 2, we moved to Philly, and then, suddenly, a global pandemic brought us to our knees. We worked from a new home in a new city with two kids pretending to learn their ABCs on Zoom calls, and we reached for a cocktail promptly at 5:01 p.m. every night.
We went from being a couple who texted when they left the office to figure out dinner plans to being a couple who worked on top of each other, calling up the stairs, “Do you want another cup?” mid-meetings, mid-Bluey, mid-layoffs.
We’ve never owned a microwave, so stovetop coffee heat-ups became our ritual. The All-Clad 1.5-quart sat on our burners all day long, all year long, as we figured out our new normal.
We’ve since found that normal — thanks to full-time childcare and a much better coffee maker (the Bonavita Enthusiast, which was a longtime Wirecutter pick). But that year of warmed-up coffee and too-early negronis may always haunt us.
Year 10: Bottles, bottles, bottles
The All-Clad set is a treasure not only for newlyweds and Thanksgiving hosts but also for postpartum parents. I used the stockpot religiously to sanitize bottles for all of our kids, including for our post-COVID third.
With our first, I went absolutely crazy, boiling our no-gas, slow-flow, anything-to-soothe-the-baby Dr. Brown’s bottles every night of parental leave. Then I went back to work, and our Grenadan nanny schooled us in all things child-rearing, including feeding.
Tap water was just fine to clean the bottles — oh, and also the baby needed more milk than my low-production breasts produced, so please order formula to supplement, rush shipping if possible. We hung up the stockpot, I bulk-ordered food, our little guy became a chunker — and we all became much happier.
Our kitchen editors describe the All-Clad set as a “buy-it-for-life set,” and I couldn’t agree more. Though I’ve flubbed overworked meatballs, under-seasoned stuffing, and over-cleaned bottles during the course of my marriage, it’s never been because of the cookware. It’s simply human error — as worth reflecting on in cooking as it is in marriage.
*This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Catherine Kast. *
Meet your guide
Lauren Sullivan
What I Cover
Lauren Sullivan is Wirecutter’s director of audience, overseeing search, social, newsletter, and all the ways readers can find our journalists’ best-in-class coverage. It’s the coolest of jobs. Before Wirecutter, while raising two kids in an 800-square-foot shoebox, Lauren helped newsrooms (NBC News, The Huffington Post) and brands (LearnVest, Etsy) develop editorial strategies. She has since upgraded to a Philly row home and a third kid, but she still carries that minimalist mindset with her. (She has never owned a microwave.)