Work Text:
FROM THE DESK OF ACTING DIRECTOR MARIA HILL
CC: AGENT PHIL COULSON
RE: S.H.I.E.L.D. CATERING DIVISION
ATTN: AGENT MALLORY MURPHY, EXECUTIVE CHEF
After collating intel from multiple sources, in order to prep assets ROMANOFF, NATASHA and BARTON, CLINT for their preliminary briefing (re: SECRET AVENGERS), the presence of gourmet baked goods has a high probability (93.4%) of inducing an attitude favorable to mission acceptance.
As such, consider this a direct order to prepare and have present, at minimum, TWO DOZEN of such goods in debriefing room 1226D by 2600 HRS.
Find enclosed guidelines for the preparation of scones (termed “LUCKY”) per Agent Coulson.
Maria Hill
….
Agent Mallory Murphy sighed.
My God, that’s a pompous memo. For Christ’s sake, just say, ‘These two respond well to free homemade goodies.’ Which would make them absolutely no different than any other SHIELD agent she’d run across ever. They were supplying the recipe, too, wasn’t that great, and Medical had vetted it, meaning that she'd have to get any changes approved by the whitecoats. Mallory rolled her eyes and clicked on the attachment, prepared to have to modify it into something edible.
Yes, by all means, ignore the expertise of people who have devoted years of their life to the art and science of cookery in favor of somebody’s mother’s recipe that she probably got from Reader’s Digest back when cottage cheese and pineapple rings were considered cutting-edge cuisine.
She read the scan of the grease-spattered index card. Well, that wasn’t too bad: apart from the saccharine commentary, it looked like a fairly standard scone recipe. Besides, Mallory suspected that publicly slagging anything related to Agent Coulson’s mother would result in a significantly diminished life expectancy.
She pulled up the kitchen's inventory software, verified that they had what they needed, marked off the necessary ingredients, forwarded the order on to Gianina Chelli, head pastry chef of the HQ kitchens, and moved on to the next item in her inbox.
…..
SHIELD's Catering Division was a surprisingly complex operation. Taking their cue from the various submarine services, SHIELD’s food - especially on the Helicarrier – was uniformly excellent. The agents worked long hours at incredibly dangerous jobs with the knowledge that they could never be recognized for their service: good food was a small gesture towards making up for that. If it was an actual possibility that you might end up tortured to death in a supervillain's secret Antarctic compound – your final fate a total mystery to all your outside friends and family – SHIELD Catering would at least see to it that your last meal had been a good one.
(Mallory had said as much, in so many words, to a group of field agents once. They'd all laughed their asses off, clapped her on the back and said they appreciated the thought.)
This was Mallory Murphy's domain, and she was proud of her position as Executive Chef – she'd apprenticed for years in some of the finest kitchens in New York to land a job as an Exec, but she’d never imagined anything like this. She oversaw the Mess Kitchens primarily, but also helped to manage R&D and the Wetworks divisions. (Like everything at SHIELD, the Catering Division had a darker side: covering the taste of poisons and their respective antidotes without increasing or decreasing their efficacy was a lot harder than it sounded. Even just reading about it had put Mallory off marzipan for the rest of her life.)
The only person that Mallory had to answer to (apart from Director Fury) was Henri Auguste, SHIELD's Chef de Cuisine and a sort of elder statesman in the department. The usual path of a midlife crisis has a man ditching his humdrum career to throw everything into a pipe-dream of running a restaurant; Henri's had him ditching his string of Michelin-starred restaurants to go back to school to learn the fundamentals of military rationing and long-term food preservation. SHIELD had snapped him up, let him write his own ticket and as a result it was not unknown for agents to swipe field ration packs to bring home when they needed to impress someone with their expertise in the kitchen.
The only downside was that Henri’s exalted status meant that he could shift everything he didn't enjoy doing off onto her, a privilege of which he took full advantage. Mallory continued to wade through every bureaucratic crisis that had sprung up overnight.
A new e-mail popped up in her inbox from Gianina, with the subject line, “Problem.”
Mallory cringed, and opened up the e-mail. “We're out of chocolate chips,” wrote Gianina.
Mallory swore, and headed down to the kitchens.
….
Running out of an ingredient might seem to be a minor issue, but given the restrictions under which they were forced to operate, accurate accounting was absolutely vital. SHIELD Catering dealt with very specific suppliers, suppliers who had been thoroughly background-checked and who were paid a premium to guarantee consistency in everything they sold. What's more, all incoming consumables had to be thoroughly scanned, a procedure that could take between twelve and twenty-four hours. (This particularly onerous requirement had been instituted after the Targeted Hormone Disruptor Incident of 1989, a highly-classified yet almost universally-known security breach – it didn't help that there were a couple of second-generation junior agents running around with highly suspicious birth dates. The enemy had slipped the chemicals into the food supply via some adulterated butter, and it had been Catering’s cross to bear ever since.)
In this particular case, there simply wasn’t time to get anything through regular channels. Mallory didn't really care whether the scones were chocolate chip, cranberry-orange or licorice-and-dill-pickle, but she did very much care about running a tight ship, and sloppy record-keeping was not how that was accomplished. It would be better to make an example now out of something minor before it happened with something Mission-Critical. For something on the level of, say, screwing up the coffee supply, Fury would probably demand ritual suicide in front of a full audience on the deck of the Helicarrier: undercaffeinating SHIELD almost certainly counted as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
She got down to the kitchens to meet Gianina and verified that, yes, in fact, they were out of chocolate chips. Mallory tapped her foot, weighing the options.
“Time for a Secret Agent Shopping Trip?” asked Gianina.
They'd done it before – making a surreptitious foray out to a random grocery store on the rare occasion an ingredient came up short, on the theory that SHIELD’s enemies wouldn’t waste the effort of infiltrating every market in New York City – but it wasn't really an option on something that Medical had had to approve. Medical’s… interventions tended to be very precisely calibrated, and nothing Mallory wanted to take the chance of messing with.
“No, we're going to have to suck it up. I'll e-mail Medical, you send the culprits up to my office.”
….
Mallory sent off an e-mail to Medical with a copy of the recipe and a list of the kitchen’s scone-appropriate ingredients. She also sent off an e-mail to Henri to apprise him of the situation and ask for his assistance – there were two points of failure here: the sous-chef in charge of reconciling the actual supplies on hand to the records in the computer, and whatever gormless idiot used the last of the chocolate chips without telling the quartermaster to reorder. They were both about to face some very loud French music.
Her phone rang. “McNene and Sullivan are on their way up.”
“Sullivan was on pantry-duty, so it was McNene who couldn’t be bothered to report?” asked Mallory.
“Says he just forgot.”
“Well, he won’t do it again.”
“You’re going to have them talk to Henri?”
“Can you think of a better way to hammer the lesson home?”
“Not really.” Gianina laughed. “Fifty bucks says Sullivan cries first.”
“You’re on.” Mallory ended the call when there came a knock at the door. “Come in!”
Paul McNene and Mariani Sullivan slunk into Mallory’s office.
“Close the door, please,” said Mallory.
They complied.
“I trust Chef Chelli explained why you’re here?”
“Yes, Chef!” replied Sullivan. (Technically, she was Specialist Sullivan, as Mallory was technically Agent Murphy, but this was a kitchen, after all, and traditions die hard.)
“And she explained why this sort of screw-up is such a problem for us? Why it can’t happen again?”
“Yes, Chef!” they both replied this time.
“Do you have any questions for me, regarding anything she said?”
“No, Chef!”
“Good.”
Sullivan and McNene shared a look. “That’s it?” asked McNene hopefully.
“From me, at any rate.” Mallory paused for effect. “Neither of you have had occasion to speak with Henri in a professional capacity, have you.”
The two specialists blanched. “N-n-n-o, Chef,” stuttered Sullivan. McNene just stared.
“Well, you’re in for a real treat, then.” Mallory beckoned them to follow her, and escorted them into the Inner Sanctum.
Henri Auguste’s office looked like a cross between a Belle-Epoque gentlemen’s club and Bond Villain Plotting Room. It was ridiculously ostentatious: admittedly, if Mallory had won a Silver Bocuse, she’d probably put it in its own alcove with a spotlight on it, too, but the slowly-rotating platform was a bit over the top. In the middle of the room was a desk larger than most dining room tables, and an enormous leather swivel chair faced away from the door.
Ensconced in his throne, Henri turned towards his unfortunate underlings. “I understand that the kitchens today were given an order that they will not able to fulfill.”
“Yes, Chef,” replied McNene and Sullivan in chorus. The two of them had started to sweat.
“I further understand that you two are the primary reason that that order will not be obeyed.”
“Yes, Chef,” came the Reply of the Damned.
Henri sighed the sigh of those long-suffering strivers who find themselves surrounded by drooling morons. “François Vatel, majordomo to Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, organized for his master a banquet seating two thousand people, in honor of his majesty Louis XIV. When the seafood delivery failed to arrive, and Vatel realized he would not be able to meet the high standards demanded by the dignity of the Prince’s household, he returned to his quarters and ran himself through with a sword, so to remove the blot on the Condé escutcheon.” Henri stood and placed his knuckles on the desk, and began to shout. “I understand that in these enervated modern times, I may not demand such a fitting expiation of sin, not even at SHIELD! I despair of the profession if this is what it has come to! In all my days, I have not seen such imbecilic incompentence, such assinine ineptitude…”
Mallory zoned out as Henri tore strips from his victims’ respective hides: the man was ranting on and on about “Sacred Trust” and “Dereliction of Duty.” (Though she did make a point of glaring at McNene - fifty bucks was fifty bucks, after all.)
“You, Murphy, will redeem the Honor of our Kitchen!”
“Wait, what?” Mallory snapped back to the present.
“You will, with your own hands, prepare an alternate recipe, and present the scones and an apology to the senior staff!”
Oh, will I, she thought. Because I’ve got absolutely nothing else to do with my time. Not that I’m managing all your departments or anything like that, no I was just planning to read the paper and do my nails this afternoon!
All she said, however, was, “Yes, chef.”
To add insult to injury, Sullivan had tears running down her face.
….
She went back to her office after the reaming, sat down and gently thumped her head on the desk. After a minute, she sighed, and straightened up to check her e-mail.
Medical had sent back a response to her query: the only ingredients they would approve off the list she sent were pineapple, oranges and coconut.
Pineapple, oranges and coconut!? That’s all!? What the hell are they going to do to these people?
She choked off that thought before it could go anywhere. She really, really didn’t want to know.
She wrote up a prospective recipe and sent it back for approval. Once she got it, she headed down to the pastry-kitchens.
“The Great Chef Mallory Murphy setting foot in the kitchens again? It must be serious,” came a familiar voice. Right, it was lunchtime, and that meant that Jasper Sitwell had come down to flirt with Gianina. Gianina flipped his shoulder with her towel.
“Henri’s orders,” replied Mallory, though in actuality her annoyance had ebbed somewhat. Being the Exec meant she rarely got to spend much time actually cooking: if she didn’t have so much other work waiting for her upstairs, this would be downright soothing.
“There’s this new tapas joint in Queens that I’ve got a good feeling about – up for going this Saturday?” he asked them both.
“Sure, I’m in,” said Mallory. Sitwell’s superpower was this: the man an uncanny sense for finding the best place to eat wherever he might find himself regardless of whether 1) he’d been there before, 2) he knew anyone there, or 3) he even spoke the local language. Agent Coulson swore he’d seen it work on three continents. In New York City, this translated to finding the absolute best new restaurants just before they hit the limelight – on two separate occasions they’d been seated next to the reviewer for the New York Times.
Mallory always said yes, but Gianina was playing hard-to-get. “I’ll have to check my schedule and get back to you.”
“And if I told you Coulson had already agreed to come?” he asked, a little stiffly.
She shrugged. “I’d still have to check my schedule,” she said, and oh God was she actually batting her eyelashes? “But it wouldn’t make a difference.”
Sitwell smiled.
“She’ll let you know. Now get out: some of us actually have work to do,” said Mallory.
Sitwell left, waving to Gianina and grumbling under his breath about Gordon Ramsay wannabees.
“Are you toying with that poor man’s affections?” asked Mallory.
“A little. He’s growing on me.”
“Wow, so you’re finally over your Coulson-crush?”
“Mostly. It’s dying a slow death. What can I say, I’m crazy for a sharp-dressed man.”
“Seriously? Can you really find love with a man who eats gas station pastries?”
“Who said anything about love?” said Gianina, waggling her eyebrows.
Mallory rolled her eyes. “I need a cup and a half of fresh grated coconut and a cup of diced pineapple. Get going.”
“Yes, Chef!” said Gianina in a tone of sarcastic amusement, and went off to get the ingredients.
….
And so, per her orders, Mallory Murphy was waiting at 2600 hours in Briefing Room 1226D, holding a plate of still-warm scones.
Agent Phil Coulson came in. “Agent Murphy! This is a surprise… to what do I owe the honor?”
Mallory held up the serving plate. “I am to present you with the apologies of the kitchen. We unexpectedly ran out of chocolate chips, and we hope these will be an acceptable substitute. They’re pineapple and coconut – I already cleared them with medical.”
Coulson raised an eyebrow. “You unexpectedly ran out of something in the kitchens? I hope Henri didn’t take that too hard.”
“He vented his spleen on the responsible parties.”
“Did they survive the experience, or should I be avoiding the meat pies for a while?” asked Coulson, his laugh-lines crinkling.
Mallory smiled. “They’re still breathing – assigned to plongeur duty for a couple of weeks, which may actually be a fate worse than death.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Thank you, Agent Murphy,” Coulson smiled. “If they taste as good as they smell, we’ll have no problems at all.”
Mallory thanked him, and headed off to the next fire she had to put out.