IN ANY CRAFT, there are certain indispensable, even timeless, tools. Some things work so well for so many fundamental reasons that they become integral and permanent.

I was thinking about this because in our house not long ago we bought a serious new frying pan. We already had an array of pans, from a heavy American cast iron skillet to a non-stick egg pan to a set of nice-looking and multi-layered sauté pans of different diameters. But then we got what my son dubbed “the totally awesome pan.” It’s an All-Clad copper-core 12-inch pan. It works beautifully for what we like to cook in our home. It heats up fast and evenly, food doesn’t stick to it, and somehow it doesn’t burn anything.