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“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.
Of course, it was a dream to cook with. Well, the pieces we used anyway. Because did we really need an 8-inch stainless skillet, a 10-inch stainless skillet, and a 10-inch stainless sauté pan? I also found that I missed having a nonstick pan for eggs and that I preferred a Dutch oven to a shiny stock pot for almost everything.
We’d committed to the conventional cookware set, and we did our best to make it work for us for as long as we could. But like our marriage, the pricey pots and pans only lasted about a decade. They were already losing their shine when I started reviewing kitchen gear for Epicurious and finally convinced him to ditch the full set in favor of pieces that work best for the way we each cook. That’s somehow made it easier to divide it in this year’s divorce.
The carbon-steel wok: His
We met about a year after we’d both moved back to the Midwest—he from 18 months teaching English in Seoul and I from a decade of doing everything, all the time, in Brooklyn. His love of Korean cuisine was contagious, and we regularly ordered off-menu at our go-to K-BBQ spot. At home he made me a special stir-fry that was really just souped-up Nongshim ramen with chicken thigh and fresh mushrooms, onions, and carrots churned around a carbon-steel wok. I could never get enough of it.
In our first “separation counseling” session, the therapist asked to hear our relationship origin story. It’s a narrative we’d shared a hundred times, but as my estranged husband recounted it in that office, I put it together for the first time that he’d moved to Korea only a few months after graduating from the kind of traditional college that has a football team and fraternities. I, on the other hand, got my undergrad by working day jobs while taking night classes at the New School and had already spent a decade obsessing over the rental market, scrambling to pay bills, and trying to launch my writing career. I felt like I had an entire adult life (complete with a cat and a chiropractor) in New York before we met, and even though he was a year older than me, he’d barely just begun his.
Perhaps if I hadn’t been so hyper-focused on planning a wedding and coveting high-end cookware, I would have paid more attention to the fact that we were in such different places. Unfortunately, we never quite managed to sync up, but at least we had some amazing meals while we tried.
The 7.25-Quart Le Creuset Dutch oven: His
Because we regularly discussed our future together, I knew he was never going to blindside me with a proposal. Still, I told him I wanted there to be some element of surprise. The way I imagined it (more often than I care to admit), we’d be cooking or washing dishes together and he’d suddenly turn to me and say, “Let’s get married!”
He did end up surprising me by proposing on stage in the middle of a concert to a room packed with our friends and family. We’d each gone out to see the band that was playing the night we met, and nearly two years later, toward the end of their first set, he grabbed my hand as he approached the mic. It was charming and romantic and it took me a few more years to notice that we were at our best as a couple when we had an audience, even if it was one of our epic dinner parties or rigidly scheduled supper clubs. On those occasions he usually busted out the 7.25-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven my late aunt Susie gave us for our first anniversary—a dramatic red showstopper perfect for roasting pork shoulders and braising short ribs for a crowd.
But in between the grand gestures and giant hunks of meat, I desperately craved the small, everyday displays of affection that happened when no one was looking: quiet declarations of love, quick kisses in the kitchen, eye contact that let me know he enjoyed my company. As those moments became fewer and further between, I found it harder and harder to show him the outsized love and attention he needed. The least I can do now is let him have the substantial Dutch oven—especially because I’m holding onto the smaller one I brought into the marriage.
I spent most of my marriage chronically overwhelmed—trying so hard to accommodate his demands for more time, more attention, more predictability—and constantly falling short. He never said it out loud, at least not to me, but I always got the sense he wished I were more like his friends’ wives. The ones who showed up on time to every cookout with a relaxed smile and not-too-spicy signature salsa and who could at least pretend to enjoy watching sports in the same person’s living room for a few hours every goddamned weekend. Trying to force it was exhausting and lonely for both of us—even before we added two kids and, because our second son was born in February of 2020, a 453-day Covid lockdown. If something could go into the dishwasher, it did.
At some point, though, our wedding All-Clad started cutting me when I grabbed them off the bottom rack. After what felt like hundreds of tiny slices, I came across a class-action lawsuit filed against the brand for its dishwasher-safe claims when, in reality, the aluminum core could disintegrate in the dishwasher, exposing a sharp steel rim. (All-Clad settled and offered class members various cash, credit, and replacement options.) Our particular pieces weren’t part of the suit, so we weren’t entitled to a new set. When I brought up the idea of replacing them anyway, my husband suggested I simply try to be more careful when unloading the dishwasher.
I decided I would slowly piece together a better set—not unlike what I had done before I met him—by making subtle swaps until my cookware no longer cut me. The sauce pans were the first to go after I reviewed Misen’s sauciers for work and discovered that Misen fully encloses the aluminum core in durable stainless steel.
It’s such a simple thing, adding that little extra bit of protective steel to the rim, but as I learned when testing saucepans, many manufacturers leave the core exposed and vulnerable to deterioration over time. Misen’s fully enclosed core meant I could put my dirty pans in the dishwasher without worry—and without getting hurt. In the last few months of my marriage, when simply getting through the day was so much harder than it needed to be, and a comment about dirty dishes could snowball into a three-day fight, I was so grateful for those easy-to-clean sauciers. There’s no way I’m letting go of them now.
“This is why we can’t have nice things,” I joked to my husband a couple of Thanksgivings ago after he carved the turkey on my pristine nonstick ceramic baking sheet, leaving a deep gash that ran almost the entire length of the 18-inch pan. Except I wasn’t exactly joking, and our relationship was so strained by then that I might as well have said, “You are why we can’t have nice things.”
He prided himself on the fact that—in stark contrast to his overspending wife—he wasn’t materialistic. But his disregard for housewares and the maintenance of our house often felt like a disregard for what mattered to me. As a homebody who never felt settled before marriage, I was constantly trying to make our space feel warmer and more inviting by upgrading furniture, adding more ambient lighting, and occasionally getting lost in weekend painting projects. I could read the disgust on his face any time I told him I “loved” a vintage coupe glass or a fancy Italian induction range.
Maybe he thought I loved those things more than I loved him. And in those last few years when we didn’t know how to stop hurting each other, maybe I did. Nesting brought me joy and gave me comfort, and I couldn’t always say the same for my marriage. By the end, our separate interests and hobbies might as well have been opposing values. Anyway, he doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit fazed by the scratch on the baking sheet, so he can keep that one.
The Staub Plancha: Mine
A bookish friend recently referred to my divorce as “a coming-of-age story,” and she’s right. I know myself so much better than I did when I got married and I’m happier than I’ve been in ages. I’m letting go of things that don’t serve me in this season of life—and holding onto what does.
I’m also adding some new items for the kitchen I’m creating as a single parent. I’ve never been much of a breakfast person, but after my husband and I separated in November, I was determined to start a Sunday morning pancake tradition with my boys. As a child of divorce myself, I wanted us to share something sacred and steady, and I knew I could always keep up with pancakes.
They devoured the first batch more quickly than I could turn out seconds and thirds, and I couldn’t wait to do it all over again every weekend for at least the next decade. But after a couple months of standing at the stove for upward of two hours making one pancake at a time in my favorite skillet (an 11-inch enameled-cast-iron model from Staub) it hit me that the process didn’t have to be so tedious. The following Sunday I was flipping three pancakes at a time on Staub’s enameled cast-iron double-burner griddle, which was just as sleek and sturdy as the skillet but had so much more cooking space. The efficiency means I get to sit down and enjoy a lazy Sunday breakfast with my kids—which is even more important now that I have them every other weekend.
The cast-iron griddle was a post-separation acquisition. In other words, it’s a piece I got just for me, for the way I cook right now—not something I picked up because I thought I was supposed to have it. From here on, that feels like the right way to rebuild my cookware collection and my life.