A Career Seemed Easier

(by Carol Tavris)

My mother, Dorothy Marcus Tavris, was brilliant, organized, funny, feisty, and completely uninterested in cooking. She had an independent streak that led her to become a lawyer at the age of 21, and, in the late 1940s, to go into the insurance business with my father. She had a couple of dinner-party specialties that I loved—a rice-vermicelli mix with heaps of butter and slivered almonds—but otherwise I have almost no memories of her in the kitchen.

Once I asked my mother why she never learned to