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To fall for As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), it doesn't matter if you know a beef bourguignon from a beef patty. It doesn't matter if you've never even lifted the cover of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, or, for that matter, even heard of Julia Child. For As Always, Julia is, beyond the correspondence that helped launch one of the greatest cookbooks of our time, an intimate portrait of a deep and enduring friendship.

Little did Julia Child know, when she wrote a letter congratulating scholar/journalist Bernard DeVoto on his Harper's story about the trouble with American knives, that she would find, in her own words, "a soul mate," in DeVoto's wife, Avis. As secretary to her husband, Avis answered Julia's letter, and from an exchange about the glories of French knives, the two (Child then living in Paris, and DeVoto in Cambridge, Mass.) rapidly progressed in letters to matters of the heart and of the kitchen, and often where the two intertwined.

Julia, of course, also found an unflagging champion for her expansive work with Simone Beck in the sophisticated, politically savvy, and intellectual Avis, with her Harvard ties and Boston literary connections and her culinary prowess. It was Avis who brought the massive project to Houghton Mifflin, and, later, when HM thought it too ungainly, to Knopf, where it found a home with the renowned editor Judith Jones, then early in her brilliant career.

Continue reading, and hear Julia and Avis, in their own words, after the jump.

• In a city where it seems most everyone drives everywhere, two sisters lead a taste tour, on foot.
• But a trip on the light rail can be just as delicious.
• Now that Gourmet is gone -- and with it, Ruth Reichl -- Bon Appétit editor-in-chief Barbara Fairchild steps into the spotlight at Condé Nast.
• A round-up of gravy and stuffing recipes from the Los Angeles Times' test kitchen.
• Drinking juice at breakfast? You might as well be chugging soda.
• Raising your child on a vegetarian diet? If so, meat may become the forbidden fruit.
• Even though the picks may not be perfect, it's lime season in California.
• Dining guide "EAT: Los Angeles 2010" hits bookstore shelves Dec. 1.

We've long been fans of Jen Yates' fantastically funny food blog, Cake Wrecks, so we were mighty pleased to find the she's finally assembled enough disastrous misspellings, ill-conceived concept cakes and just downright nasty icing snafus to fill a whole book, "Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong."

Also on bookshelves this month, Jessica Amason and Richard Blakeley's "This Is Why You're Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks."

See our favorites from both tomes after the jump.

Photo: Amazon

For me, it's cured fish or perhaps cold, leftover dark-meat chicken, gnawed bare-handed and shared with my minimally patient dogs.

For my husband -- who can't tolerate the smell of the pickled herring I down like a rabid porpoise -- it's almost inevitably the nearest Chinese joint's chicken and mixed vegetables sauteed in brown sauce, chased by a bourbon Old Fashioned, muddled from the unpretty orange that tags along in the delivery bag. The cocktail, I can fully support. The gloppily sauced crinkle-cut carrots have featured prominently in several of my nightmares.

These are rituals of a chosen solo cuisine, and Deborah Madison, author of "What We Eat When We Eat Alone", says it's not at all unusual that we're so diametrically opposed.

Deborah Madison: People eat what their spouses don't like a lot of the time. A number of men said of blood sausages, 'My wife doesn't like blood sausage, so when she's gone that's what I cook.'

Slashfood: How did you get started on this topic?

DM: Many years ago, I was invited to go with Oldways Preservation and Trust -- which is a food think tank out of Boston -- to a lot of Mediterranean countries. I got to bring my husband, who's an artist, and he was just a little awkward, I think. He didn't really know people but knew of them so he started asking this question kind of as a way of breaking the ice. He kept a little notebook and I never knew about this until I found it when we were moving a few years later.

SF: So many of the people you interviewed have common experiences -- they'll make a big steak or have herring. And then there were some that didn't fit the mold. What was the strangest thing you heard?

Read more about solo toast, herring and margarita mix after the jump.

I was the kind of kid who was always reading at the dinner table, obliviously dipping the corner of my Judy Blume novel in the macaroni until my mother told me to "put the book away!" Eating and reading still go together for me - I eat alone in restaurants a lot while traveling for work, so I always carry a book to keep me company. This week I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which, at almost 1,000 pages, is a bit awkward to hold aloft above my plate.

So I really enjoyed reading a piece in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, in which Leanne Shapton asks various authors to name the book they most enjoy reading during solo dinners. The results are often unexpected. "Bright Lights, Big City" author Jay McInerney is the only writer to cite a food-related book - A.J. Liebling's gastronomic memoir "Between Meals." "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" author Junot Diaz chooses Michel Faber's "Under the Skin," though he says the aliens-eating-humans scenes will turn you into a vegetarian. Israeli writer Etgar Keret says reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" had him laughing and crying into his food at a Chinese restaurant.

Do you have a favorite book to take to restaurants for solo meals? What are you reading over the dinner table this week?

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