Early Baking Influences

Risa Pisko began her letter with a statement of cultural origin: “I am Austro-Hungarian.” She was the younger sister of two older brothers, and while her mother delighted at the prospect of a little girl to dress, her father wanted to develop her “efficiency” as someone who could manage a house and kitchen. Indeed, Pisko found herself frequently wandering into the kitchen. She not only watched the Hungarian servants prepare the family meals, but she quickly began to contribute to the cooking and baking.

For Pisko, learning her way around the kitchen was not just about feeding a large family that included hired help, but also a lesson in etiquette and diplomacy. During the First World War, her family boarded Hungarian military officers who often joined the family for meals, where Pisko pointed out that they “dined” rather than simply feasted: “[M]y mother’s house became known for its exquisite cuisine.” The family cook was more than happy to give young Risa responsibility over the finer details of the meal to make cookies and cakes, and arrange “fancy platters.”

Early on through these tasks, Pisko discovered that food preparation could mean more than basic labor. It could also be a vehicle for expressions of creativity and hospitality. In their small town of Komárom (Komárno), food was a form of entertainment where “there was very little to offer to guests except fine meals.” The cultural exchange through food and recipes continued with her marriage in 1922 to Ernest Pisko and their life in Vienna in a large family home that included “a great many aunts,” all expert cooks who prioritized planning menus. “[O]ne did not eat, one dined!”, Pisko wrote, adding that she learned dishes with Czech origins from her husband’s aunts, indicating a widening worldview.

Immigration and Cooking

Pisko’s letter is as interesting for what it includes as for what it doesn’t: “I skip the whole Hitler period in Vienna. It was ghastly. There are enough horror stories told, and no one can fathom it who did not go through it.” Instead of trying to educate the reader on the trauma of annexation and expulsion, Pisko sidestepped recounting its cruel impact and the many losses and lack of resources surrounding it. In food studies, shared kitchen knowledge as a cultural preservative and a place of comfort and safety is a common theme. In wartime, recipe exchanges defied harsh realities by reaffirming traditions and creating spaces of connection. For example, in the Theresienstadt Ghetto in 1941, a starving Jewish woman, Mina Pächter (1873–1944), handwrote a cookbook of family recipes from memory for her daughter outside the camp. Although Pisko never spent time in a concentration camp and she left Austria more than a year prior to the start of the Second World War, her experiences – as reflected in this letter – still demonstrate the comfort she found in preserving and sharing her cultural and family heritage.

Pisko’s recipe knowledge and kitchen skills also provided continuity during her family’s immigration, first to Great Britain in 1938 and later to the United States in 1940. In England, Pisko used her decades of cooking experience as she worked through the frustration of not being able to read a battered English-language cookbook – the best-selling Mrs. Beeton’s Cookery Book (1861). There, the universal language of taste was her translator as she learned that cakes could also be called tortes, and biscuits could also be called cookies. “I became bold,” Pisko wrote as she discovered that she could still excel at creating tasty dishes that pleased cross-cultural palates despite the initial language barriers. Her new knowledge increased her repertoire of dishes, and Pisko was delighted to discover new recipes.

In the United States, Pisko gained industry and agency through her kitchen skills, working for two different families as a live-in cook, supplying her family with an income while her husband returned to his career in journalism and her daughter was in high school. Her proven confidence and intuition in the kitchen helped Pisko overcome her lack of ability to speak and read English and secure employment until she became fluent. She showed fortitude and endurance to work this way for two years before the family of three reunited under one roof in an apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Pisko continued working in both commercial and private kitchens, but due to the repetition of labor and menus and the lack of agency without the benefit of cultural enrichment and exchange, working as a cook lost its appeal. She desired to leave the kitchen and return to her “old profession,” the world of books and publishing. In Vienna, Pisko had contributed to running the bookstore her husband co-owned. To transition into this career in the United States meant that Pisko had become highly proficient in English, although she did not specify in the letter what she did to acquire the necessary language skills.

In her efforts to transition out of kitchen work and back into publishing, Pisko encountered the push-pull many women have experienced between the economic opportunity kitchen skills provide and the limitation of women’s work being relegated to gendered spheres. She also bumped up against a long-standing “servant problem” in the middle class that had sought efficient domestic labor since the American Civil War (1861–1865). In the North, Black migrants from the South and white Irish immigrants had competed for paid domestic positions since the mid 1800s, and employers often lamented the failure to find good workers to offload grueling housework. This dearth of good help persisted through the years following the Second World War, renewed by the exodus of women from the workforce back into the domestic sphere.

As a newly arrived immigrant in Boston, Pisko’s skills and experience gave her an advantage and a connection to others with a European heritage. “The first family I worked for was of German origin and I cooked Viennese to their great delight,” she wrote. But those skills also threatened to contain her talents when she wanted to return to the world of publishing. Pisko recalled, “When with a letter of recommendation I came to the big boss of a company, instead of employment in the business world, he offered me the housekeeper’s job in his home, with all fringe benefits up to living quarters for all of us.” Pisko, to her credit, held firm and refused the offer, persisting in the job search until she secured a position as a clerk in a bookstore. At last, cooking was no longer her livelihood, but relegated to a hobby, one that centered primarily on recreating family recipes. Through her articles published in The Christian Science Monitor, food was the vehicle through which Pisko demonstrated her command of the written word and shared her Central European culinary heritage.

Fig. 1: Risa Pisko demonstrating how to make Wiener Schnitzel, 1966. Photo by Peter Main © The Christian Science Monitor (February 24, 1966. www.csmonitor.com)

Conclusion

Risa Pisko’s letter to Phyllis Hanes completes a full circle. It begins with a declaration of her Austro-Hungarian identity; travels through Vienna, England, and Boston; and ends with her commitment to exclusively recreating “old family recipes” – a return through taste and memory to the home she was forced to leave behind. That return allowed her to share scores of recipes with Monitor readers for a quarter of a century and to contribute to more than a century of New England and Boston culinary traditions. Her culinary legacy also lives on through her grandson, Eric Corty, who not only learned many kitchen skills from Pisko, but is currently co-editing a cookbook based on updating “Risa’s Recipes” for modern American cooks and bakers.

Selected Bibliography

Further Resources

Amy Carney, “Austro-Hungarian Recipes for an American Audience,” Fulbright Austria Seminar in American Studies, 2025: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkQ8ENXeHWo.

Mary Baker Eddy Library Podcast, Episode 85, “The Piskos—to Vienna with love from The Christian Science Monitor”, 2023: www.marybakereddylibrary.org/de/research/podcast/85-the-piskos-to-vienna-with-love-from-the-christian-science-monitor/.

The Christian Science Monitor, international nonprofit news organization founded in 1908, “About,” 2025: www.csmonitor.com/About.