Hmmm, cookery...
Well, as for flavors, there are only six the game really need worry about:
salty
sweet
bitter
sour
spicy (as in hot peppers)
umami (savoriness, like meat or mushrooms)
Balancing those flavors in a dish is what makes it tasty, and perfectly balancing them makes a dish that special kind of "I wish I didn't have to stop eating it is so good." If Toady can get his hands on some molecular gastronomics papers he should be able to derive or find a suitable recipe formula. I know at least one exists, and all you have to do is plug in ANY food that fits the variables' properties, make the dish, and voila! something tasty.
That is, to go with the DF procedural thing. Going further, food raws would then have flavor tags and preparation tags.
Flavor tags give scores in the flavor categories to a food item.
Preparation tags give the ways in which the food can be cooked. Each civ then has a list of preparation methods they favor, maybe some they completely ignore, and food categories they don't consider edible (like say, pancreas). So, like:
Baking
Roasting
Frying (in a pan)
Frying (in deep fat)
Boiling
Stewing
Molding (gelatins)
To go with those, the extracts arc would need to be enacted to include:
Flour/Meals (we've got that, but there should be more)
Gelatin (from bones)
Broth (MAYBE, but seems tedious)
Rendered Fat (refined lard, butter)
Oil (olive being the big one there)
Some spices (things that need drying, like caraway or shrimp powder)
A speculative recipe forming routine:
- Check stockpiles (by records if you have a bookkeeper or on foot if you don't) for food items that the cook's civ considers edible
- Cross reference that with cooking methods the cook has available (related to skill as well as civ).
- Select a main ingredient (possibly by personal preference, manager orders, or Noble preference)
- Plug that into the recipe formula and pick a cooking method
- Populate the rest of the recipe formula as best as it can (via skill) and select compatible cooking methods for the secondary ingredients
- Tweak the formula with available seasonings (also according to skill). Seasonings would in general only have one flavor category assigned to them, so the cook can balance things provided skill and supplies cooperate.
If seasonings are one flavor category to aid in balancing the recipe formula, then spices would need to be different and just be an item of preference. For example:
Seasonings (augment one flavor):
Salts
Sugars
Acids (Vinegar, particularly)
(no clue for bitterness)
Hot Peppers
Broth (for umami; alternatively, mushrooms)
Spices (an ingredient of preference and not included in the recipe formula):
Rosemary
Basil
Sage
Bay Leaf
Clove
Fenugreek
To support all that and breads, which are different because of the scale they need, you'd need new workshops:
Kitchen - Makes finished meals like before
Herbalist Shop - Herbalists could prepare spice plants, or this could just be in the Kitchen as an automatic job
Bakery - Breads and the like
Smokehouse - Smoking meat
*Vinegar Fermenter - Duh
*Oil Press - also duh
*Creamery - cheeses and butter
Asterisks mean that those workshops could just be stuck into the farmer's workshop. The smokehouse has for certain been suggested before. Bakery should be separate because this is at the latest 1400s tech: the staple food is a daily task and the dwarves should eat some at every meal. That is too much traffic for the kitchen if it is also making normal meals. Furthermore, randomly giving civs access to leavening would add some nice variability.
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Topic: Cooking Arc (Read 5137 times)