The first step of the puzzle is to use the information provided to construct a family tree. The information is sufficient to both construct relationship and relative age, so we arrive at this family tree of the five mothers and their daughters, ordered from oldest to youngest:
Additionally, each family member’s description mentions one or more food items, and all of the children’s descriptions include a numeral. Collating all of this information yields this tree:
Reading the first letters of the names in the order they’re
presented here yields the hint THEY ARE SUCH SAUCY
LADIES
. As clued by the hint, the title, and the general
food theme, each of these characters corresponds to a classic
French sauce. The five mothers are the five mother sauces of
French cuisine, and the children are daughter sauces—variants of
those mother sauces.
Each character can be matched with a coresponding sauce based on their position in the family tree and the ingredients provided. As an additional confirmation, the number of letters in each character’s name is the same as the number of characters in the name of the sauce:
Using the numbers of the daughter sauces as indexes into the
sauce name yields the request PREPARE US A MACARON
. Teams
which successfully follow that instruction are given in exchange
the final answer,
INITIAL THREAT
.