Mr. Henry received this query from Oldersis:

Dear Mr. Henry,

Having read your postings on the most wonderful Manolo’s Food Blog, I am appealing to your expertise. My fiancé and I must register soon for all manner of kitchen implements. I already have my eye on the KitchenAid stand mixer (the one constant on every bridal registry I have ever seen) and I am taking your advice regarding the Cuisinart hand mixer to heart.

However, I am unsure about which pots and pans I should select. I am very much looking forward to removing the albatross of my current cheap pots and pans from around my neck and I think having beautiful and useful cookware will encourage me to try my hand at more cooking efforts. Do you have any suggestions?

Mr. Henry is not a man to shirk responsibility. Having received this request weeks ago, a heavy request for expertise in preparing the foundation of a marriage, no less, he has walked the streets of New York carefully mulling over a suitable response, one he hopes may still be timely.

The choice of wedding register cookware begs more fundamental questions. What sort of cook are you? What sort of cook do you hope to become? Do you want to feed your friends and relations on a weekly basis? Do you have plenty of cabinet space?

Because you are already a food blog reader, Oldersis, you likely take a serious approach to eating, a good sign for a healthy marriage. Mother Henry always admonished her son to choose a girl with a hearty appetite, a sign of robustness in all worldly pursuits.

Great food can be made with rudimentary implements. If you want to stock a mountain cabin, all you need is a cast iron skillet and an enamel (or other non-reactive) stock pot, either of which can be used on the stovetop or in the oven.

In Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners, Alice (Audrey Meadows) cooked on a typical city stovetop barely big enough to hold two cheap pots at once. Ralph didn’t seem to miss any meals.

As a rule, the heavier the pot, the better the performance. Cast iron hold heat so well that when you throw in your meat or vegetable, the cooking surface temperature doesn’t reduce very much and everything cooks evenly. Likewise for sauce and soup pots, a heavy pot cooks from the sides as well as from the bottom and thus yields consistently good results.

But unless you have exceptionally strong wrists, handling a cast iron skillet is a difficult task. You risk dropping it, scratching your sink and countertop with it, or burning your hand from its hot handle.

Worse, if you don’t clean it quickly it will rust. Mr. Henry imagines that after a hot dinner on a cold night newlyweds have other priorities than cleaning up pots and pans.

Therefore, he no longer includes the cast iron skillet on his list of first essentials. He begins, instead, with the single most useful pan of all for two people, the 12-inch anodized aluminum non-stick skillet by All-Clad (either the LTD or the MC-2, your choice of finish). Anodized aluminum is a brilliant invention that replaced teflon a generation ago.

The reasons he keeps coming back to All-Clad are several: First, the rivets holding the handle to the pan fit snugly with no gaps to harbor bits of old food. The handle is well-balanced (an empty pan won’t tip), long enough to grab easily, constructed to resist getting too hot to hold bare-handed, and made of metal so you can begin a dish on the stovetop and finish it inside the oven.

All-Clad makes five lines. The copper core line, unbeatable for conductivity, is very expensive for everyday use. If you think your in-laws really want to please you, however, get a few of these.

Next on the list of essential implements is the 5.5 qt. LeCreuset enameled iron round dutch oven, the most versatile single kitchen pot, ideal for tomato sauces, soups, pot roasts, or steaming vegetables. It’s beautiful as a serving dish, too. (The 7.25 qt. model is so large that when full it becomes too heavy to handle.)

Mr. Henry adores his covered Le Creuset enameled sauciér, too, an all-purpose vegetable and sauce pot ideal for a two-person dinner. (You may use its heavy lid, as well, in a fry pan as a weight to help brown onions or mushrooms.)

To cook well, you need above all the ability to imagine with your nose, as well as an impish, insouciant predilection for flinging things about in the kitchen. The right pan helps, but can’t replace the right enthusiasm.

What you do not need are sets of pots and pans devised not by chefs but by merchandisers aiming squarely at you, the nervous newlywed who wants to get started on the right foot.

Buy yourself a new pan when you feel inspired to try a new dish or to establish a new direction.

[Mr. Henry has a personal, somewhat quirky, slightly misanthropic habit: Whenever he invites guests for dinner, he serves something he has never prepared before. In this way he imposes upon himself a certain obligation to pay attention to what he is doing lest he embarrass himself and his guests, too. Without this challenge his attention is likely to wander away from what’s happening on the fire.]

Years ago without explanation Mrs. Henry started making crepes on Sunday morning. Although she rarely buys anything more than a pair of sensible shoes in September, one day she sallied forth and bought the All-Clad crepe pan, a one-dish wonder that Mr. Henry scoffed at, thinking it would clutter up the pan drawer. Many hot crepes later, he wants to declare here and now how very wrong he was about this.

In response, Mr. Henry bought the LeCreuset oval gratin dish (in flame, of course). She scoffed, but now her roasted potatoes demand it.

Once a week the Henry kitchen counter, cleared of extraneous cups and bowls, becomes the site of industrial production. It’s time to make Pepper’s food.

As faithful readers know, Pepper is the Henry’s noble hound, a 67-pound mystery mix of Labrador retriever and border collie. For years she ate Stella & Chewy’s raw chicken or raw lamb frozen burgers, a rather costly diet. Lately, however, Pepper’s stomach has resisted the raw Stella & Chewy’s, a surprising development in light of the pleasure she takes in snagging detritus off the Broadway sidewalk.

Wisdom du jour instructs dog owners to prepare raw food, in particular raw chicken, following the theory that a raw diet mimics what wild dogs ate. Since the dog had been domesticated for 30,000 years, give or take, Mr. Henry wonders just how much chicken they have been getting, historically speaking, and thus to what degree their digestion is genuinely accustomed to such fare. Sitting around the campfire of early man, domesticated dogs probably dined on charred tubers, rotten seeds, and scraps of gristle and sinew, as well as on bones too small for man to bother cracking with a hand ax.

Mr. Henry’s personal theory is that the modern dog retains one eating habit left over from the Stone Age, however, a taste preference rather shocking to the urbane dog owner. The one reliable comestible around a human settlement, after all, season after season, was man scat.

Pepper’s list of favorite foods is topped by stinky cheese, followed by buttered toast, salmon skin, and apple peelings. Is there a pattern here?

What follows is Mrs. Henry’s personal recipe for a canine raw diet, ingredients deliberately chosen for ease of preparation. Mrs. Henry prefers boneless breast of chicken because she can throw them whole into the food processor right from the package. Lentils are the only cooked ingredient.

For even chopping, process each ingredient separately. Mix together, place in muffin tins (topped with wax paper for easy stacking), and freeze. Yield: 24 cupcake portions.

Each morning Pepper eats four cupcakes. At night she eats 1 ⅓ cups dry food, half Innova dog food and half Evo small bites (low carb), with a splash of buttermilk.

The one quibble Mr. Henry has with this recipe is the absence of added salt. Since he always shares a scrap from the table with his constant quadruped, however, he imagines she gets her allowance of salt thereby. And, of course, there are sticks to chew, grasses to munch, and treats to beg at Patagonia. The world is full of possibilities.

Pepper’s Breakfast

3 lbs. boneless breast chicken
1 cup cooked lentils
½ bunch kale (or spinach) – leaves & small stems
1 sm. bag carrots, peeled baby
½ bag cranberries
2 apples
blueberries, a handful

In 1962, Tangier, Morocco, was a cosmopolitan city, even though Mr. Henry had not yet been there.

He did not have the pleasure of attending Ridha’s circumcision party at the house on rue Darwin, a party deemed by all to have been a singular success, by all except Ridha himself, that is, who in addition to the unenviable discomfort of the ritual procedure suffered an asthma attack so severe that his father had to hustle him into the Peugeot 404 and carry him up into the Eucalyptus forest to breathe its calming natural vapors.

The drink of choice for sophisticated guests was “un petit whiskey” – a shot of scotch at the bottom of a tall glass embellished by one or, at most, two ice cubes melodramatically administered with silver tongs.

In the rose garden, in the gazebo, and throughout the fruit arbor, guests feasted on Esther’s magical bastilla. They drank several cases of Johnny Walker Red liberally poured by police officers moonlighting as waiters. Upstairs in the bureau, however, for 45 years protected by sturdy lock from curious uncles and nosy gardeners, one case survived intact. When Nadia closed the house this summer, she added that case to the shipping container.

Distilled spirits are supposed to be perfectly stable. Once bottled they are said not to age or change flavor either for better or for worse.

Through 45 years of winter fog and summer scirocco the cork stoppers have dried and become brittle, yet they pulled away without crumbling. About a centimeter of liquid has evaporated from each sealed bottle and the whiskey has darkened slightly. The small exchange of oxygen caused a madeirization, a slow alteration of both color and taste.

At this writing Mr. Henry has just drunk from one of these bottles and he can announce here for the first time a breakthrough in modern whiskey-ology. The 1962 scotch tastes smoother and has less bite than a current one, now more a sipping scotch than a mixing one.

Once freed, the amber genie in the bottle unleashed swirls of memories from spirits long departed. Pouring a third one for purposes of further research, Mr. Henry raises a glass to the circumcised and to the uncircumcised alike.

Mr. Henry wants you to live well. Consequently, when rich, practical-minded, no-nonsense aunts ask you what you need for the home, he encourages you to choose from the list below:

Cuisinart food processor. The original.

KitchenAid 2-slice toaster. Simple and foolproof.

Bodum French press coffee pot. The classic.

Cuisinart drip coffee maker. For big cup drinkers.

Microplane spice grater. Excellent for zesting.

Wusthof knives, 2. The most basic set.

Aerolatte milk frother. Affectionally known around the kitchen as “the zip-zip.”

The Chef’n palm brush for scrubbing vegetables. Nifty finger-holding grip.

The MinoSharp knife sharpener. You won’t cut your fingers.

The Zyliss stir fry silicone spatula. For non-stick pans.

Zyliss salad spinner. Achieves escape velocity.

The topic of blenders drew mixed response.

According to Little Henry, weekend couch rat and Food Network devotée, the Australian-made Breville Ikon blender is the Iron Chef “Kitchen Stadium” choice. To clean it, however, demands disassembling the blades from the canister, something Iron Chefs are not required to do.

Since Mr. Henry does not handle sharp objects early in the morning, he would not use the Breville to mix Dr. Schulze’s “SuperFood” green goo smoothie.

(Before this blender business gets resolved, however, Mrs. Henry may get bored with the suspicious Dr. Schulze and move on to some new herbal quackery that doesn’t require a blender at all.)

Although Cameron asks forgiveness for buying the stand mixer in metallic chrome, Mr. Henry should be the penitent. She hit upon an important omission in his rule of black and white, and by doing so obliges Mr. Henry to issue a new dictum, one that holds equally for furniture and for architecture:

Machines should look like what they are.

By this measure the chrome stand mixer is not only an appropriate choice, it may be the best color choice of all.

Although there was much virtuosity in Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau, both movements in their inception harked back to an earlier era of handmade objects, an imaginary prelapsarian paradise when happy craftsmen took joy in their work. This is faith-based, anti-scientific, Luddite nonsense.

Art Deco design is more satisfying because it celebrates the functional, the scientific, and the industrial. Its focus is forward, embracing the future. A chair supported by metal features metal as its essential design element. It is not hidden by curlicue wicky-wack.

Style harbors ideology. Faux American colonial furniture holds within its green Carolina hardwood an implicit longing to return to Gilded Age aristocracy, an imaginary gentility based on family, class, and race. The prominent survival of debutante balls reflects the same backwards belief system.

Mr. Henry likes sitting in an honest chair.

As for Funoozer’s suggestion to relegate microwave ovens to the basement, while certainly a suggestion with merit, here in New York City basements are called “garden apartments” and they belong to other people.

Can there be a more beautiful object anywhere in the home than the aristocratic KitchenAid stand mixer? Countertop-challenged New Yorkers gaze longingly at such a status vehicle the way other Americans gaze at a Jaguar.

The KitchenAid bar blender is equally sleek, but there is dissent about its practical application. Mrs. Henry maintains that it is too noisy and, worse, that its beaker is too wide at the bottom. As a consequence her modern morning smoothie of banana, berries, juices, and Dr. Schulze’s SuperFood (a sinister green concoction of algae, seaweed, grasses, and yeast) gets stuck inside.

Each and every morning brings a fresh episode of the same drama. Chasing Little Henry round the table she cries, “Drink! It will change your life!” By the time she coaxes the last dollop out of the blender, however, Little Henry, who has never tasted the stuff, has made a clean escape out the door to catch the bus.

Color choices for kitchen appliances are style decisions that tellingly reflect family values. Though never one to foist his opinion upon others, Mr. Henry maintains that appliances which reside on countertops should be (like underwear) either white or black. Blaring colors like pistachio and pink deflect the eye from the machine’s (or the torso’s) principal attraction, namely, its sublimely engineered shape.

With regard to the KitchenAid bar blender, however, since Mr. Henry never uses the thing, he really doesn’t care.

The Waring or the Osterizer have narrower bases and might be better. He simply admires their shape – pure modern aerodynamic heaven, like the 20th-Century Limited, New York to Chicago, a voyage into the future.

The gadget he reaches for time and again, however, is the Cuisinart hand blender. For apple sauce, cream soups, mashed root vegetables, and the like, it’s perfect. Immersible in hot liquids, it comes apart for easy cleaning.

Microwave ovens perpetually annoy. The door closing with a sharp clack succeeds in awakening both the noble hound sleeping deeply on her bed and the worthy father napping earnestly on his couch. When foods are suitably nuked, infernal micro-beeps pierce every corner of the household. Microwave ovens are NOT on Mr. Henry’s Christmas list. He longs to construct a kitchen without one, but they are too darned useful.

Mr. Henry’s notion of holiday cheer comprises eating, drinking, bah and humbug in equal parts. He resists participating in national frenzies like Christmas bargain-hunting, college football rivalries, or presidential primaries. He admits to being a complete devotee, however, of religious music, and in pursuit of it will spend long hours seated on cold cathedral pews.

For the benefit of his faithful readers and in collegial competition with Twistie’s suggestions last week, Mr. Henry here reveals the first installment of items personally used by and personally endorsed by Mrs. Henry herself – high arbiter of practical good sense. You may present these at Christmas fully confident of escaping the whispered ridicule of loved ones.

Twistie’s endorsement of the Le Creuset 5.5 quart enameled iron Dutch oven is not overstated. The Dutch oven Mrs. Henry recommends, however, is the 6.75 quart oval Le Creuset (in flame), a veritable battleship for braising, the superior combat weapon for pulled pork or pot roast, big enough to ensure plenty of leftovers and commandingly beautiful on the table.

Although the round oven yields marvelous roasts and stews and works fine enough for risotto, for his own risotto Mr. Henry prefers something with a shallower lip and a non-stick surface. His uses the Swiss Diamond 4.3 quart sauté pan with transparent ovenproof lid and steam escape valve. Although lightweight, the Swiss Diamond conducts heat reliably. The risotto will cook to crunchy perfection yet not stick. (The trick for risotto, no matter which pan you choose, is to make sure the broth you add is piping hot.)

For sauté pans, there is no finer instrument than the All-Clad non-stick. If you are ambitious enough to attempt a béchamel or other eggy French sauce, however, you may want to spend the vacation money on an All-Clad copper core sauce pan. It holds heat so well that as you add cool ingredients to your sauce its temperature doesn’t drop very far. With this pan you become a magician of the wooden spoon.

Mr. Henry is not consumed by jealousy. He is happy when others pipe up with opinions about food, especially so when Mr. Henry concurs with these opinions.

While traveling during Thanksgiving holidays and unable to post, he read two excellent Manolosphere entries: Twistie on Christmas gifts and raincoaster on turducken, a fresh new Frankenstein monster for holidays.

Ayyyy! Mr. Henry recalls his very favorite recipe from the old Joy of Cooking, a recipe not included in the updated version (!). Found in the frozen food section near the back, it is an Eskimo recipe for stuffed walrus, one that often comes to mind during discussions of stuffings at Thanksgiving. Here he quotes from memory:

“Gut your walrus. In its cavity place one flock of small birds after having first removed one wing feather from each wing. Sew the cavity closed, cover the walrus in snow, and leave it outside to freeze for the winter.

Come spring, partially thaw, slice and serve.”

Please don’t try this at home.