Chicagoan Joan Reardon has spent the past few years pouring over the personal letters between Julia Child and her penpal/friend Avis DeVoto. If it wasn’t for DeVoto, Child’s seminal book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking might have never reached bookshelves. It’s a fascinating tale of friendship, trust and mutual admiration between two women who were complete strangers, until Child sent a letter to DeVoto’s husband, following a story on knives he wrote in Harper’s Magazine in 1952. I spoke with Reardon this week, over coffee at Lula, about how the two women nurtured a friendship for two years before they even met.