oNE OF THE LOVELY things that can happen to a girl in an office every day is lunch. Lunchtime is fraught with possibilities! There’s all that lovely eating . . . vitella con riso in little al fresco Italian restaurants, winter steak-sandwich lunches in chop houses all dark and tweedy and huggy-bear, French haute cuisine the marvelous week before Christmas when everything’s sparkly and champagne-y.
Aside from all the good eating during lunch, you could also be asked to get married, to go merry-go-round riding, to accompany a housing developer on a trip to see what develops or to help somebody steal documents out of the front office. Lunchtime can also be a quiet time of meditation ... while you knit up messy ravels from the night before.
Lunches with men are surely some of the best experiences of a girl’s work life. Those lunches alone could be the reason any woman should want to hold a job. We’ll get to the boy-girl lunches in a moment. First let’s talk about girl lunches.
My idea of an absolutely nothing way to spend a lunch hour with girl-pals from your office is in a mediocre, noisy, stale-smelling, second-rate restaurant. True, there are some great inexpensive restaurants but they probably aren’t handy to your office, so you wind up in the hash-house where you still can’t get out with a tab of less than four dollars, the management isn’t very friendly and some of the things you get to eat wouldn’t have passed muster in the galley of the Bounty.
On certain fiendish days you and your girl friends need to be soothed by icy martinis, of course, and waited on hand and foot for morale purposes. In that case go to the restaurant, but make it a good one while you’re at it—for man-reasons as well as morale reasons. And take one—not five—dashing girl friends with you. You may find the foyer so crowded you’ll get to cluck-clucking with strange dreamboats about the service. You may get seated in an alcove next to some of them or one may drop his overcoat on you in passing. Anything can happen, but not with five other girls.
Unless you have a definite, special lunch date or unless fellows and girls are going together and it’s to be party-like, I think it’s much smarter to bring your lunch from home than to go to a dismal eating place practically ever. Home-lunch can be delicious glamor-girl fodder instead of junk. You can enjoy deep-down quiet visiting with your friends and save enough money to spend Christmas in Jamaica.
Do I hear even a peep of approval? Of course not! The only things I hear probably are deep, nasty growls of contempt! It seems to me girls who ought to be bringing their lunches most bring them least. A brown paper bag is supposed to be degrading—like the scarlet “A” on Hester’s sweater.
I think this is just plain silly! Many people who could afford twenty dollars a day at the poshest establishment bring their lunch regularly because the food is better and the office atmosphere more relaxing. George Cukor, the elegant director of My Fair Lady, totes a beautiful little picnic hamper to work every day in the back of his Rolls Royce and dines elegandy on cold pheasant, foie gras and Dom Perignon 1951. (At least I’ve been told this by people who know him.)
Rather than out and out bring lunch from home, some girls prefer making forays to the catering truck—figure it saves their image. How misguided can you be? Catering-truck stuff says far worse things about you than the brown paper bag fare I have in mind (which people will be hovering in your office just to watch you unpack). Besides, the chuckwagon food is often wretched eating and expensive. As one fastidious Detroit secretary (after my own heart) says, “I’d rather eat dog biscuits than any of Kiss-Me-Katerer’s (her company’s catering truck) mealy hamburgers, cold-cream pies or hot dogs on wet cotton buns.” (She’s right about the dog biscuits. They’re formulated for nutrition and aren’t a bit bad.)
“Kiss-Me has hard-boiled eggs,” she concedes, “but they’re twelve cents apiece, $1.44 a dozen, and I, for one, am not going to pay those prices, nor thirty-five cents for their twenty-five-cent cartons of cottage cheese.”
No, you may not have a hamburger and malt sent up from the drugstore either! The tab is ninety-nine cents plus tip, and with the exception of the teeny-tiny piece of hamburger, you’re only putting expensive junk into you. For the same money, you can bring a lunch from home that’s good for you and delicious. You can even do it for a quarter of the money. After lunch is consumed, there are a dozen uplifting things to do during the rest of your lunch hour. (We’ll list them.)
It’s true some companies don’t have a very good place for girls to eat. In one company I worked for my desk blotters used to curl up like snails from having so many tomatoes and peaches peeled on top of them. They would reach the saturation point, curl up and die! Another sufferer told me she wasn’t supposed to eat lunch at her desk because of working for a wheel, but because of working for a wheel she couldn’t get away from it. Consequently, whenever she heard foosteps during lunch, she slammed everything into the bottom desk drawer, then tried to get the mayonnaise, lettuce, meat loaf and tomato back into sandwich form after the visitors left. (Cake icing she ate right off the side of the drawer with a spoon.)
Another friend told me about sticking some cottage cheese in the back of a drawer for later consumption and then forgetting about it. Ten days later the whole department was gamy, but nobody knew what it was—only that the smell got worse when Priscilla was at her desk (presumably opening her cottage-cheese drawer to get things out). Finally, when the whispers got so loud Priscilla couldn’t ignore them, she went on a thorough search and found her cottage cheese busily making penicillin.
If your company has no decent place for you to lunch, I suggest you stroll to the park in nice weather or eat in the back of an automobile. Very cozy and private.
What should you put in your brown paper bag?
You ve heard about the man who opened his lunch box every day, inspected it and said, “Ugh! Peanut butter again!” After several days of this, one of his co-workers said, “Why don’t you ask your wife to fix something else if you don’t like peanut butter?”
“Oh, I’m not married,” he said.
There’s no excuse for you to be stuck with peanut butter or anything else dull because you are in control. You don’t need to be confined to sandwiches either—those dull, starchy, glumpfy things.
This may not be the time to pound you about eating healthfully, but just allow me one little pound. Lunch boxes are the land of opportunity, nutrition-wise. You can’t get nutritionists to agree on everything. There’s a school that’s anti-squash and string beans, would you believe it? Too starchy! Another is death on orange juice . . , too sugary. Yes, sugary! But one thing you can’t get a single nutritionist not to endorse, no matter how contrary, is protein. The whole living lot of them say you need protein to make your hair shinier, your brains silkier, to increase your horsepower and, oh, a lot of things that have to do with your being sexier at the office. There is just no reason why many of the fifty-one grams of protein you need daily can’t be got into you F.O.B. through your brown paper bag lunch. And deliciously.
Here are two Brown Paper Bag Plans, both high-protein and satisfying. The first consists of inexpensive and homey items, some of which you’ve probably been packing for years. The second was outlined by my fancy cooking friend, Margo Rieman, and is the last word in Continental cuisine. It’s even glamorous! Not a solitary sandwich to either plan, of course.
These lunches will give you a body beautiful, save enough money to afford you chinchilla and are easy, easy, easy to assemble. The things you “cook” could be made Sunday or Monday night and go into your lunch all week if you like them.
| For desk drawer: | Sharp paring knife Package plastic spoons Plastic icebox dish to toss a salad in Can-opener |
Lunch #1: A twenty-cent container of yogurt in your favorite flavor—vanilla, strawberry, orange, prune or pineapple. A handful of almonds. One soy-date mufEn. This doesn’t sound like much, but it’s plenty. And you can learn to love yogurt. Here’s the muffin recipe:
| 1 cup soy flour (sift before measuring) | ½ teaspoon salt ¾ cup fresh whole milk |
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| ½ cup whole wheat pastry flour (sift before measuring) | ½ cup honey 2 beaten eggs |
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| ½ cup powdered skim milk | ½ cup soybean oil | |
| 4 teaspoons baking powder | ½cup chopped walnuts |
½ cup chopped dates approx. 14)
Sift dry ingredients. Combine honey, eggs, oil and milk in another bowl. Add dates and nuts to dry ingredients. Make a well in dry ingredients and add liquid all at once. Stir until moistened. There will be lumps. Fill greased muffin pans two-thirds full. Bake in a 400 degree oven until crust is golden brown—about 20 to 25 minutes. Makes one-and-a-half-dozen muffins. Store them in a plastic bag in the refrigerator to keep forever!
Lunch #2: A half-pint carton of cottage cheese plus a small can of dietetic fruit—raspberries, loganberries, prunes, pineapple. (Or take fresh fruit if you prefer.) One date-soy muffin (we have lots of those from the recipe). One small package of salted or toasted peanuts.
Lunch #3: Chef Salad. Take crisp from the refrigerator and put in wax paper bags any of the following: (they’ll stay fairly fresh.) Lettuce—head, romaine, Bibb, watercress—tomato, cucumber, celery, green pepper or cooked vegetables. Chop and toss at lunchtime with a little salad dressing brought in a capped dixie cup. Bring a few strips of salami for spiciness if you like.
Lunch #4: Mother Browns Rich Dessert Tuna Salad. Bring in container and eat with two Triscuits, Euphrates Wafers, Rye-Krisp or other crackers. Have three or four potato chips for wickedness, if you like. (This recipe lasts through five lunches, so I always had it every day for a week.)
1 4 oz. can white-meat tuna
2 or 3 dollops low-calorie mayonnaise (or any other kind)
2 or 3 sweet gherkin pickles cut up
1 cold hard-boiled egg, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped in little pieces
Half an apple, chopped in little pieces (leave skin on)
Few sprigs parsley, chopped
1 raw carrot, chopped
½ small box of raisins
Mix everything up. You can leave out all these ingredients except the tuna and mayonnaise and still have the salad.
Lunch #5: Slice of Gladys Lindberg’s high-powered meat loaf. Fresh fruit soy-date muffin.
(This will last all week and then some.)
| 2 chopped onions | ½ cup soy flour | |
| 1 green pepper | ½ cup powdered skim milk | |
| 2 pounds ground round | 3 tablespoons catsup | |
| 1 pound ground heart | 1 ½ tablespoons salt | |
| 3 eggs | ¾ cup fresh milk |
Pinch of thyme and basil
(If your market doesn’t have soy flour, just leave the flour out; also powdered whole milk may be used if they haven’t powdered skim milk.) Saute onions and pepper lightly in a little oil. Add the rest of ingredients and mix well. Mold into a loaf in shallow pan and bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.
Splurge any time of day you please with one or two pieces of Protein Energy Candy. It’s delicious!
| 1 can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk | 2 tablespoons vanilla 1 ¼ cups regular powdered skim milk |
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| 3 tablespoons soybean (or other)oil | 4 drops black walnut flavor |
½ to 1 cup chopped walnuts
Mix together condensed milk, oil, flavorings. Add powdered milk one-half cup at a time, mixing until smooth. Mixture will get so thick it will be difficult to mix. Keep adding as much powdered milk as possible. Add walnuts. Place on platter. Chill and cut in squares.
This plan’s mother, Margo Rieman, says the fare may seem a little sophisticated at first, but in many countries these things would be considered merely every-day. (If Jean Seberg or Brigitte Bardot brought lunches to work, I daresay they would be things like these.) Margo says also, “If your stomach lurches at the smell of cheap, greasy food and your soul rebels at the cost of it, I believe these menus will please you.” I believe they’ll fracture you and have everybody meowing around your lunch box like jealous cats at lunchtime.
| For desk drawer: | Knife, fork, spoon Can-opener Small salt and pepper shakers Box of paper napkins A small plate A cup |
| For the lunch cupboard at home: | |
| 2 small thermos bottles 2 small plastic containers with lids |
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(Cans or jars of the following:)
| Shrimp | Anchovy paste | |
| Sardines | Garbanzo beans | |
| Kippered snacks | Soups | |
| Pimentos | Olives | |
| Anchovies | Red caviar | |
| Caponata (eggplant and vegetable mixture) | Smoked salmon Regular salmon |
Marinated artichoke hearts
| Rye-Krisp | Triscuits | |
| Euphrates Wafers Rye wafers Melba toast |
Soda Crackers (search for the long narrow ones called Saratoga Flakes) |
To buy when needed:
| Camembert | Cottage cheese with chives | |
| Liederkranz | Romano | |
| Bleu | Black pumpernickel—two kinds: | |
| Monterey Jack | fat round loaf | |
| Sharp American cheddar | thin heavy squares | |
| Black Diamond cheddar (if you can find it) | Thin sliced rye Sour Dough French |
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| Cream cheese |
At the use-rate of one or two slices a day, these breads could become stale. What you do is find a heavy plastic zippered bag, big enough to hold at least two loaves. After the bread is opened, wrap the loaf in Saran Wrap, zip it into the bag and keep it in the refrigerator. It’ll stay fresh. If you have a freezer—even better! Wrap your daily supply individually, take out as needed—it will be thawed by lunchtime, and never stale.
Since the cheeses could spoil too, wrap them very carefully in Saran Wrap to exclude all air, then fit them in plastic containers . . . the kind ice cream comes in. Each will hold two or three pieces of cheese because you don’t buy large hunks of any one cheese at a time. You do want to have several kinds of cheese on hand at once.
If you want cheese to keep even longer, wrap it up in a clean cloth wrung out in vinegar and store it in the refrigerator. Re-dunk the cloth every so often.
Also to buy as needed:
Fresh fruit and vegetables, depending on what’s in season and what’s cheap.
Added starter for your lunches (in the best Continental tradition):
Buy one gallon of light red wine, one gallon of dry white wine. “Get good honest wines,” Margo says. (I guess after you’ve tasted a few you get to know which the sneaky, dishonest ones are.) Decant these as needed. (That means pour them from the big original bottle into a smaller icebox bottle.)
Before you go to bed, pop into the refrigerator one thermos, lid off, to chill. In the morning it will be filled with whichever wine you think will be best with the lunch you’ve chosen. You also dope out the menu for the next day.
The wine situation:
You may work in an office where consumption of an alcoholic beverage is strictly forbidden, at least on the premises. (No telling how many Manhattans and Gibsons are brought into the office in people containers after lunch.) Rather than make any shock waves whatever by pouring wine from your thermos into a long-stemmed Baccarat glass, pour it instead into a china cup. This can serve as your coffee mug during the rest of the day.
Should any of your co-workers discover your fine, boozy secret and giggle it up, smile sweetly and say, “I like a glass of wine with my lunch. It is a very civilized custom.”
A younger girl might explain, “We’ve always had wine with meals at home. Daddy knew how good for us it is.”
Now let’s mix and match some of your supplies into delectable little lunches:
Continental Lunch #1: A small can of shrimp, opened and drained at the office, a small plastic cup of cocktail sauce for dunking, a hard-boiled egg, half an avocado, a couple of Saratoga Flakes for crunch, a piece of bleu cheese to put on the crackers and white wine to drink. In effect, you’re getting the ingredients of a very expensive shrimp salad at about one-tenth of what you’d pay for it in a restaurant and without all the fattening dressing that usually goes with it.
| 1 cup mayonnaise | 2 tablespoons sour cream | |
| 1 dash tabasco | 1 dash salt | |
| cup chili sauce | 1 tablespoon gin |
(The gin does something very special!)
Lunch #2: A can of Caponata (eggplant and vegetable mixture. Very tasty. Look for this in the Italian Foods section of your market.). A slice or two of thin, heavy black bread to spread it on, a goodly hunk of bland but robust Monterey Jack cheese, half a tomato sliced, sprinkled with basil leaves and put in a little plastic container. Fill the thermos with red wine. A pear or apple could follow if you really want to stuff.
Lunch #3: Black bread, a can of pimentos cut into sections and fitted into squares of the bread, topped with anchovies—two to a piece—and some of the anchovy oil drizzled on the bread as well. Add a container of marinated garbanzos (drain garbanzos from the tin, soak overnight in a dressing of 4 tablespoons olive oil, 1 tablespoon vinegar, salt, pepper, 1 clove crushed garlic, 1 cup minced parsley) and a piece of Liederkranz cheese spread on slices of an apple. Red wine again with this.
Lunch #4: The hors d’oeuvres binge. Take a supply of Melba toast and Triscuit, a block of cream cheese, a jar of red caviar, a tube of anchovy paste, a glass jar of marinated artichokes, a few slices of salami, some celery sticks, a little container of mixed olives. The cream cheese goes on the crackers, then either a dot of anchovy paste or a spoon of red caviar on top . . . the other things arranged nicely around the rest of the plate. This day, add two or three kinds of cheese to the brown bag and a pear. The wine will be white.
Lunch #5; Make vichyssoise from a can of frozen potato soup dumped into the blender with a can of milk added slowly as it runs. Throw in a handful of green onion tops, chopped, for extra flavor. Chill overnight. Pop this into a cold thermos. The rest of lunch might be a goodly piece of cold chicken carefully hidden away from last night’s dinner (you do eat a sturdy little dinner, don’t you?) and a triangle of Camembert to spread on a slice of sour dough French bread or Triscuit. The wine would be white.
Lunch #6: Minestrone is a wonderful soup for a cold day. Heat it (from a can) in a saucepan before you leave home. Put a big helping of freshly grated Romano cheese in the bottom of the thermos, pour the soup on top. The two will blend during the morning’s wait. Mix half a can of tuna with a little mayonnaise, some chopped celery and green pepper and put it into a container to spread at lunch on sour dough bread. Eat in alternate bites with half a tomato. “Dessert” would be grapes and sharp cheddar cheese. The wine is red.
Continental brown-bagging is not the least expensive way to dine although it is much cheaper than restauranting. To acquire your basic shelf of goodies you could earmark ten dollars a week (the price of only three lunches out) and eat all your lunches in during the two or three weeks it takes to build up a cupboard variety. Or, if you prefer, build gradually. Every time you market, buy one or two tins of delicacies to stash away. Acquire the breads and cheeses last. When you’re all stocked up, begin the adventure. There’s no end to combinations!
For a change of pace, with any brown paper bag plan at all, you could also do trade-sies. Bring your little luncheon to the office—anything that’s edible—and trade lunches with a co-worker. This introduces an element of surprise! The watch-phrase here is “do unto others.” No palming off five-day-old fillet of sole on an innocent or you’ll never get another reciprocal-trade lunch partner.
After lunch is over, one of the nicest things in the world to do is nap. As a matter of fact, I don’t see how any girl with a full date schedule can hope to be as perky on the job as she should be unless she naps occasionally. You may have to improvise a napping place. I managed to snooze like a tabby cat one whole year by unrolling a little strip of red carpet (this was no ordinary body, it was mine) out from under my desk and curling up on it. The floor was otherwise bare. I always preferred my own floor to “sleeping around” on borrowed couches. You never know when an owner is going to return unexpectedly and drive you out like a dumb animal. If you nap on the floor, you must remember to lock the door, and no fooling. Otherwise, you can get your head bashed in. Also it gives cousins from Stillwater and prospective clients touring the office a terrible start to open a door and discover a flaked-out girl on the floor.
Here’s how to pop off to sleep under the most adverse conditions—no rug, no quiet, and precious little time. It’s a yoga exercise I lifted from Desmond Dunne’s Yoga for Everyone (A London Four Square Book).
1. Lie flat on your back with weight distributed evenly. No lumping everything to one side. Having assumed this position, don’t move. Absolute stillness is the crux of the whole routine. When you first start, you think you’ll go mad not being able to twitch around, but it’s the enforced stillness that makes you finally crumple and relax.
2. Now here’s the yoga. Stretch an arm, leg, foot or even your neck very hard. Make the muscles contract and study what is happening. ‘You’ll be surprised how other muscles start contracting in sympathy” (quoting Dunne). “If you clench your fist strongly, you’ll feel contractions all the way up your arm and down your shoulders and back.” Oh, boy! Hold the stretch while you trace these sensations in detail, then let go. That’s the end of step one.
3. Step two. Stretch hard again, but this time do it in slow motion. Build the stretch up slowly and “observe” everything going on in your body because of it. (What’s going on is tension.) Again, hold the stretch, then let go in slow motion. Let go slowly, slowly, carrying the ‘let-go” process beyond the point where you are conscious of any physical sensation whatsoever. Continue ‘letting go” until you reach the stage where you are no longer trying to relax but have completely lost all feeling of alertness. (This is why it’s best not to have your head near an unlocked door.)
When you start, Mr. Dunne advises you to concentrate on relaxing one part of the body at a time. Later, you begin to “let go” more generally until you stop thinking of specific areas. It’s probably best to begin with the head, then pass down the body relaxing groups of muscles as you find them, easing the arms from the shoulders, the legs from the hips, and so on. When you’ve practically blanked out all tension and alertness right down to the toes, go back up to the eyebrows, eyelids and eyeballs and start over. Mr. Dunne thinks it’s more restful if you don’t pop off to sleep, but I never can stay awake with this routine.
Here are two other sleep inducers ... on the floor or in bed when you get to one. To get your mind to stop racing, rhyme. Start with a base word like “inch.” Then go down the alphabet and see how many words you can make—bench, cinch, clinch, dench (nothing—can’t use it), drench, finch, flinch, French, gench (nothing), etc., etc. The base word that makes the most words wins and gets a prize!
The second go-to-sleep trick is to take a letter of the alphabet—say “K.” Then you go down the alphabet starting with “A” and find a name that fits each set of initials. “AK” is Anna Karenina, “BK” is Ben Kalmenson of Warner Brothers (you can use personal friends, famous names, or fictional characters). “C” is Christine Keeler, “D” is Danny Kaye, and so on. Sleep tight!
If you don’t feel like sleeping, here are some things to do after you eat lunch.
Visit a museum. Study a particular subject that interests you—the American buffalo, Egyptology, other museum prowlers.
Stake out a pottery plant that sells seconds and replenish your china. It’s very hard to tell seconds (at a fraction the cost) from firsts.
Scour the thrift shops for a dining room table to saw the legs off of and make into a coffee table, or a chest to refinish, or a jet brooch for $2.75.
Play at the zoo. Take some lunch for the monkeys.
Play miniature golf.
Drink up knowledge at the public library.
Take a book to the park and park under a tree.
Duck-watch by a pond.
Play tennis.
Snoop at the second-hand or first-hand bookstore.
Stroll in a foreign part of town.
Go to a gymnasium.
Shop.
Find a carnival and ride the merry-go-round.
Swim in a friend’s pool.
Be an art lover at a gallery.
Go to the movies. Take your lunch with you.
I can certainly recommend the movies. The irmning time of some is less than two hours. When the two girl copywriters and I were in the fungus-y green advertising office, we saw Ruby Gentry and All About Eve practically one entire day by taking turns calling in to say we’d be downstairs to deliver our respective batches of copy any minute. Nobody was going to come up to fungus-ville to check on us, and it never occurred to anyone we were actually calling from the R.K.O. Pantages next door.
You may think I assume you don’t like your work when I recommend far-fetched, far-away things to do on your lunch hour. Not at all. I hope you love your work, and I assume that sometimes you don’t do anything at lunch but work right straight through. Other days, however, I don’t see why you can’t scat for a change of pace.