In 2011, President Barack Obama presented the rocket scientist Yvonne Brill with a National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Photograph by Ryan K. Morris / National Science & Technology Medals Foundation / White House.

The most grating phrase in the opening paragraph of the Times’s obituary of Yvonne Brill, a rocket scientist whose inventions satellites still depend on, is not the one the newspaper changed after a burst of outrage—the one about beef Stroganoff. The Stroganoff, if anything, is a clue, one ignored in the obituary, whose greater flaws, like Brill’s achievements, are hidden in plain sight. Here is how it originally began:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

And this is how the first two paragraphs read now:

She was a brilliant rocket scientist who followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at eighty-eight in Princeton, N.J., in the early nineteen-seventies invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

No beef Stroganoff, no “but”—as if there were a surprising contrast between “world’s best mom” and “brilliant rocket scientist”—and no “also.” Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s public editor, wrote on Twitter, “To the many who’ve tweeted at me about the Yvonne Brill obituary, I sure agree.” She pointed to a Columbia Journalism Review piece that was a plea for profiles of women scientists that did something other than explore the mystery of how they could actually be women scientists, with column inches devoted to reassuring readers about the well-being of their children, rather than the robustness of their results.

But that, again, is not the worst of it. The most infuriating line is the one in which we are told—even in the post-Stroganoff version—that Brill “took eight years off from work to raise three children.” Many paragraphs down, we learn that this is factually inaccurate:

She left [Wright Aeronautical] in 1958, however, to care for her young children, keeping her hand in the field by working part-time as a consultant for the FMC Corporation. In 1966, she went back to work full time, taking a job at RCA’s rocket subsidiary.

Emphasis added. So she did not take those “years off from work”—she worked at a more flexible job with less than full-time hours. A woman’s work can be in full view, in a lab or in an office, and a sort of sociohistorical optical distortion field still blinks it out. Even to the writer and editor of the obituary, who typed and read that sentence, it was somehow invisible. Her consulting, according to an interview for the Society of Women Engineers that the Post linked to, involved FMC’s work with ARPA, the forerunner to DARPA, on rocket propellants, for which she needed and obtained a security clearance. (“I was able to do a lot of performance calculations to guide their chemical manufacturing, or to eliminate compounds that wouldn’t be fruitful for performance.”) That is a bit more than dabbling. The Post’s obituary notes that her later work at RCA involved weekend and evening hours. There is no single formula for “the world’s best mom,” but in the case of this family it seems to have involved one who kept making real rockets while also spending time with her children and their toys.

“Good husbands are harder to find than good jobs”—both the Times and Post obituaries quote that line of Brill’s; the Post said that it was part of “family lore.” What is a good husband, though? In Brill’s case, it appears to have been one who supported her professional aspirations. In her interview with the Society of Women Engineers, she says that he agreed before they got married that she’d keep working; she said she’d seen young women engineers held back by husbands who were jealous of their success, even as she’d been helped by one who was “self-confident” enough to joke, at parties, about getting to spend the money she earned. At one point, she moved for a job of her own—one in London. He stayed behind in New Jersey.

Some defenders of the beef-Stroganoff lead have said that one ought not to be silent about the demands placed on women in that era to fill certain roles. And one shouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean simply repeating the stories they needed to tell to succeed in a workplace that would otherwise have wasted their talents. “ ‘You just have to be cheerful about it and not get upset when you get insulted,’ she once said,” the Times tells us. But now, from the distance of years, can’t we be a little insulted on her behalf? She might not have let on that she was insulted—but it is clear that, at every stage, she pushed back. (Leaned in, one might say.) Perhaps, in that sense, we could admire some of the optical illusions she herself engineered, rather than just setting them to music.

Which brings us back to beef Stroganoff. Has anyone who opined about that line had beef Stroganoff lately? One of my notes to myself was to put it in the rotation, because there is hardly an easier recipe out there. It is one notch above macaroni and cheese and Hamburger Helper, and has much in common with both. I am not talking about the artisanal variations, with herbs and actually chopping things, but something like the old Betty Crocker recipe calling for beef broth, egg noodles, and a container of sour cream. It can be the ultimate working mother’s preparation. Then again, perhaps Brill put it together in more complex ways. She was, after all, a rocket scientist.