Work Text:
When Nate admits that he thought the only thing he was good at was busting heads, Eliot isn’t offended. After all, he’s put a lot of time and effort into cultivating that image. In fact, he’d rather that none of the team know that he can cook, given that he still doesn’t trust any of them, but it was the only way for Eliot to gain access to the Moscone home, given that a mob boss is already going to have his own security.
He knows that Nate is annoyed that he’s more focused on the food than finding the money, but maintaining their cover is incredibly important. If they get blown, it doesn’t just put the job in jeopardy, but also their lives. And while the versatility of the kitchen knife that he explains to Nate is true - and useful - it’s not the reason he learned to cook.
Cooking started as a way to survive - his mama had died, his sister was too young, and his daddy was a useless drunk, so if Eliot didn’t cook, no one would. He wasn’t making anything elaborate as a pre-teen. They could only afford the basics and his daddy wouldn’t eat anything that wasn’t a standard “meat and potatoes” meal anyway.
In high school, once he started working, he would start making one meal for his daddy and another for his sister and himself. This allowed him to expand his skills, and get some variety in his diet for the first time since his mama passed. He also learned that it wasn’t just a survival skill - once he’s allowed to put some creativity into it, he learns that it’s something that he genuinely enjoys.
During his relationship with Aimee, he definitely used cooking as a way to impress her. They’d known each other for years and she knows his entire lurid family history, so he felt like making elaborate meals for her was the only way to prove himself worthy of her affections. She did finally tell him that he doesn’t need to try so hard, but he still enjoyed showing off, especially since it kept her from asking any questions about where his money comes from. The only time it came up, he said that he does “this and that” and fortunately, she never pressed it further.
He stopped cooking as much after their break-up as he threw himself into his work, taking one job after another, only staying in one place long enough to get paid. It isn’t until shortly after his first run-in with Nate that he returns to the hobby as a narrow escape from the then-insurance investigator ended up with a dislocated shoulder, which required taking a few weeks off. He didn’t realize how much he missed it until he had the time to return to it.
Eliot started getting choosier with his jobs, trying to pick ones where IYS wouldn’t be sending their top investigator after him. Eliot is good at what he does, but so is Nate, and Eliot is smart enough to not want to tempt fate. And since his sister is grown and self-sufficient, he no longer needs to support her, which means if he picks wisely, he only needs to take a few jobs per year.
Having more free time also allows Eliot some liberties as he cooks. he no longer follows recipes, instead choosing to experiment and make up his own. They aren’t all winners - and if pressed, he will admit that a few were downright vile - but there are a handful that he revisits.
When word gets out that Nate lost his son and is out of the game, Eliot starts taking more jobs, so cooking takes a backseat again. He expects Nate’s absence to be only temporary, so his goal is to earn enough that he is able to retire before Nate jumps back in and starts pursing him again. When Nate recruits him to work with him, Eliot is stunned and he definitely intends for it to be a one time thing - as they all did at the time.
Once they become a team, Eliot finds himself with plenty of time to cook, which definitely comes in handy when the Mascone job comes around. When Heather Mascone first spits out the stuffed mushroom, he fears that his skills are rusty and he will blow their cover, but instead it turns out that she’s just a pompous bitch. And given the tight time frame until the wedding, it’s not like she can find another caterer.
Keeping busy in the kitchen should have been a way to stay off the radar of the Butcher of Kyiv, but Eliot should have known better than to think things would go according to plan, because of course it never does. Given his upbringing, he hates that subduing the Butcher involves wasting food, but when it comes to staying alive, you do what you got to do. His original plan is to continue keep the full extent of his culinary skills secret, given that none of the team actually ate anything he made, but then Hardison tried - and complimented - one of the mushrooms and Eliot decided that fuck it, he’s going to be spending a lot of time with these people, it’s okay to feed them from time to time. It starts simple, like the pasta he made when letting Theresa know they had the restaurant back and her husband would be getting out of prison, but as they continue to work together, he falls back into both experimenting and using food to show off. It’s not a matter of trust - given that Nate is the only one that he doesn’t expect to eventually stab him in in the back - but a matter of practicability. And if he’s being honest with himself, there’s also an element of insecurity. Not every job is going to require brute force and there’s a part of Eliot that needs to prove that there are other reasons to keep him around. And feeding them seems like the perfect way to do that.