About a dozen years ago, I put about a dozen items on my wedding registry. I remember making the wishlist, 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, one that made fried eggs perfectly well for years? 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
These pans continue to impress us with their even heat distribution. Each piece is extremely durable and an ideal weight for holding.
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.
