What David Lebovitz Can’t Live Without

I love peanut butter, but I don’t understand smooth peanut butter. It’s like people who don’t like nuts in their brownies. It’s fine if you don’t like nuts in your brownies, but you can keep that to yourself because it’s not important to my life. This hasallthese different seeds in it. It sort of has a little smoky taste because the nuts are roasted. There’s lots of little things going on when you eat it. It’s amazing to put it on a piece of baguette in the afternoon, but I really try to parcel it out and just enjoy itau naturel. It’s the best thing you can put in your mouth.

CeraVe is owned by L’Oréal, so we can get it here in France. One thing I’ve learned in life is to moisturize. It’s the best thing you can do. The water here is very mineraly — very hard. It ruins coffee pots and espresso-makers and dishwashers. So I hydrate my skin. The CeraVe is also unscented, which I need.

This is also unscented. I haven’t found an unscented shaving cream here. So I usually bring over five or six at a time when I visit the U.S., and sometimes I’ll have people bring them over for me too. It’s funny because America is this country where everyone thinks everything’s industrial and gross and horrible, but there’s all these unscented products everywhere. That’s one thing I miss. I just love that this doesn’t break me out — I don’t have problems. I don’t get dry skin. These French guys always have this half-centimeter beard all the time. I haven’t been able to do the scruff thing. I shave every day.

When I moved to France, I brought a bunch of All-Clad pieces over. I was a restaurant cook for 40-something years, and I’m just used to holding the All-Clad in my hands, with that handle. It’s a perfect size. It’s not super heavy. It’s really good for cooking two steaks, a couple of chicken thighs, a couple of chicken breasts. It lasts forever. You can burn the shit out of it. You just put it in the sink, and an hour later you can scrape all that crap out and it’s perfect.

At the risk of trying to look like a young person — not being age-appropriate — when I was in Japan, I bought some wide-leg pants. They were not cheap, but they were really well made. When I got home, back to Paris, I went to Uniqlo and I saw they had these pants. They were in the women’s department, but they’re unisex. I tried them on, and they were super comfortable. They were only $39, and now I wear them literally every day. They’re not so baggy that you look foolish. They’re pretty elegant and just really comfortable. I actually bought a second pair in black for traveling because I figure they do double duty as casual and sort of dressy. I still wear the Japanese ones, but since they were more expensive, I don’t want to wear them down.

I just switched to these. The company was actually going bankrupt a few years ago and the government bailed them out by helping the employees buy the company. Now, they’re having trouble again. The problem is their stuff doesn’t break. They say you can drop them on the floor and they won’t break. I don’t know if that’s true, but their stuff is really good, and considering what goes into making a glass container, especially in France where labor costs are super high, it’s nice to support them. And I decided any plastic we can reduce from our lives is probably a good idea.

[Editor’s note: There currently aren’t very many Duralex containers sold in the States, including the exact model Lebovitz owns. These are similar.]

This is a recent purchase we made about a month ago, and I would literally not live without it now. I hate to be the person who went to Japan and doesn’t stop talking about it, but … When we came back, I was like,Do I really need one of those?But we don’t have children. There’s no college fund that we’re been putting money aside for. So we got a Japanese toilet. These guys came in and installed it. The only problem is it comes with a 62-page booklet. I’ve never had to open a booklet to learn how to use a toilet.

[Editor’s note: This is a toilet made for the E.U. You can findToto’s selection of wall-hung toilets made for the U.S. here.]

Few in France drink Lillet. It’s a regional specialty of Bordeaux, whereas in America, it’s all over the place. And it’s just not as interesting as Cap Corse, which has citron and quinine. It’s still family-owned. The red is good, but I like the white better. It makes a really good 50/50 half–Cap Corse, half-gin martini. My friend Brad Parsons, who’s a spirits writer, would say Lillet is a good gateway to French apéritifs because it’s widely available, but I say graduate to Cap Corse.

When I moved to France, I went to the grocery store and I bought this mustard. I was sitting next to this old lady and she looked at the back of the mustard bottle bulging against the plastic bag they used to bag in, and you could see the label. She said, “Very good mustard. You chose the right one.” It’s the cheap mustard of France — like the everyday mustard — but everybody loves it. It’s really strong and powerful. My partner is French, and we have to have a jar of Amora mustard in the fridge at all times. It’s also something I always bring to friends when I go back to the States.

This is the new version that just came out. I’ve been making these recipes for 30 years or more. A lot of them are recipes I made at Chez Panisse when I was working there. People kept asking me for recipes, so I thought,I’ll do a book. It was actually originally two books that we eventually pushed into one when I signed with a new publisher, and now I’ve gotten to revise it again. When you’re a writer, you don’t often get a chance to go back and correct things, but I love the process of redoing a book and keeping it relevant. We maybe used to do things a different way, or certain things weren’t available. I rebaked mostly everything, and we had two food stylists who came from the U.S. to do the photography, and they baked all the recipes, too. Usually stylists might find, “I had to bake this for 20 minutes, not 10.” But they kept saying to me, “These recipes really work.”