How now, Hausfrau?

It’s summer and very warm on the famed Café Tomaselli terrace in the heart of Salzburg. Nevertheless, I’m sipping a hot coffee and nibbling strudel (mit Schlagobers — whipped cream, of course!) with Melissa (Missy) Baldino. We are talking food, fashion and Rike & Co., the charming entrepreneur’s new business.

Missy launched Rike & Co. this past October from her charming Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may seem a bit incongruous in this age of hyperfeminism to be selling aprons and housedresses. But “Rike & Co.,” Missy says, “is all about family and being fashionable while cooking and doing housework and everything else that many of the fairer sex still enjoy doing.” The company is a tribute to Missy’s Austrian mother, Rike (who died in 2020), and her five-year-old daughter, Rike, who loves to cook and get messy with mommy.

The aprons and house dresses (hauskleider) are also a tribute to her oma (grandmother), Rosa, who wore a hauskleid in the kitchen and while doing housework to protect her dresses and dirndls, the charming Austrian dresses that accentuate a woman’s curves. (Thank you, Julie Andrews, for introducing the dirndl to the world as you raised the von Trapp children in Salzburg!)

The soft-spoken, stylish forty-seven-year-old just wants to give women like herself, who’ve given up successful careers to stay home, a way to be fashionable hausfraus, Missy insists. “My mother was born and raised in Salzburg, where I spent my summers as a child. My oma would dedicate her mornings to preparing the quintessential Austrian lunch. She always wore a hauskleid. It wasn’t about being chic, but rather practical and comfortable. She cooked a lot — my favorites were Wiener Schnitzel, nockerl (Austrian for spätzle), tafelspitz (boiled meat with a fantastic dill sauce) and Marillenknödel, which is an apricot dumpling. She also made homemade apricot marmalade which was to die for.”

When Missy became a mother in her forties, she says her focus shifted to spending more time at home, caring for her kids and managing her housework. “This inspired me to create Rike & Co. because I desired my own hauskleid,” she says. “Cooking is an artistic and fashionable endeavor that deserves equally beautiful attire. So I have crafted a line of aprons and hauskleider that you can wear while cooking, entertaining guests, playing with your children, gardening, running errands, and much more — while wearing sneakers, Birkenstocks, ballerinas or Louboutins.”

Missy is no stranger to the kitchen or housekeeping. She is married to Christopher Kimball, the bouncy, bow-tied chef-creator of PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Country and Milk Street. Missy has a background in advertising; she managed food and fashion accounts for an international advertising agency in London before deciding that she wanted to produce food programs for TV. “I would devour Jamie Oliver’s TV cooking show and decided to return to the Boston area, where I went to college and worked in restaurants. I tested recipes for two years at Test Kitchen and finally told Chris that I wanted to be behind the camera instead of on camera. And that I was in love with him.”

They have now been married ten years and have two young children, Rike and eight-year-old Oliver. “My children made me realize how much home mattered to me,” explains Missy. I had spent twenty years working nonstop. It’s not always easy, but I do love being a mother. Then my mom got sick, and I wanted to be with her as much as I could as well.”

Missy credits her elegant mother with sending her and her older sister, Jenny, for an apprenticeship one summer at a Laura Ashley UK hotel when they were teenagers. They then lived in Brussels and learnt how to be good housekeepers and manage things. After that, she and Jenny spent a year in Paris learning French — also at the insistence of their mother.

When Missy was deciding how to launch Rike & Co., everything came together by chance. “It was a stroke of luck,” she says. “One day I was reading Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter, and she mentioned a blog called the Flair Index. I checked it out. The story that day was about an American woman named Michelle Boor who makes made-to measure, chic, striped shirts for women in Paris. I contacted her and found out she had been married to an Austrian. It turned out she helps people like me get their start in fashion. She also introduced me to Emi, a Parisian master sewer, who also helped me launch the brand. They both helped connect me to Albini in Italy, where I get the high-grade cotton.”

The stripes are the focus of the first four styles. Children’s aprons retail for $95; wraparound hauskleider sell for $225. The styles have been updated from the ones Missy’s mother and grandmother wore. “Those designs were a little too retro, so I went with a more modern stripe. But I plan to add florals and more traditional patterns as well. Every style has big pocket for keys, phones and all the stuff women now need to have handy. And the bows I’ve made especially big to be tied in front, on the side or back. I feel they give an added elegance to what is meant to still be a useful, chic garment.”

I tell Missy about my thoughtful British husband, Richard, who gave me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday the first year we were together. I managed a faint smile but couldn’t believe the housewifely gift. My father would always give my mother jewelry, even though she was the housekeeper. For the second birthday, I got a Cuisinart mixer. It was time to speak up. The next birthday and for the forty-eight that followed, I got gorgeous gifts from Tiffany, which Richard had discovered. My collection of iconic baubles in Tiffany Blue boxes is a family legend. If Richard were still here (he died in 2022), I’d ask him to get me one of Rike & Co.’s aprons, as I still love cooking, flowers and fashion, especially now that I live in France. “They are the Tiffany of aprons,” I tell Missy.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2024 World edition.