The following guide was largely written by Quizzical, who originally posted it to the ATITD Forums. Reproduced here with permission. This replaces the previous edition of the guide. Quizzical has also made a handy Excel spreadsheet to help work out recipes, downloadable and with instructions here.
For those of you who don't want to mess with bases and additives, and just want a recipe that works, I've set up a page with the Recipes I use. --Rehpic
In order to cook, you'll need a kitchen upgraded with a cookpot. To cook a meal, get some food ingredients, and mix them into the cookpot. Once you've added the ingredients you want, cook the meal, and then you can eat it and see what stats it gives you. Kitchens now also allow you to see the current recipe, and to store a small number of recipes for quick reproduction later.
This guide is primarily concerned with cooking for stats, and not for gastronomy, banquet, or festivals.
The way that the food stats work is that there are base stats of various foods, and the base stats from the meal are the sum of the base stats of the various foods. For this, it doesn't matter if there is one carrot in a meal or a thousand; the carrots still contribute the same base stats.
After this, the base stats are then multiplied by the flavor, then divided by some constant around 102 - I don't have a particularly sharp lower bound on the constant, but it is strictly greater than 100 and less than 102.03. Thus, a +5 base strength recipe with 140 flavor would be about +7 strength.
There is then a small amount of "randomness" added to each stat, which varies from person to person and varies by meal, but for a given person and meal the same value is added to all seven stats. Finally, the game takes the integer part of the stats to find the final values that the stats give you; for example, IP(4.9) = 4, or IP(-3.2) = -3. There is one other major issue: if the flavor is not strictly greater than 100, then you get no stats at all.
There are three basic quantities that you can control, and you want to get all as high as possible. The first is the base stats, as those give you the stats that you're after. The second is the flavor, as the base stats are multiplied by flavor before getting the observed stats of the meal. The third is duration, as a meal that lasts longer is often better than one that gives the same stats but doesn't last as long. I'll explain how to get each of these in turn.
Let's start with the base food stats. When you make a meal, the base stats of the meal are the sum of the base stats of the ingredients in the meal. The table of which foods give which stats is here:
| Food: | Str | Dex | End | Spd | Con | Foc | Per |
| Cabbage | -1 | +1 | |||||
| Camel Meat | +2 | -1 | -1 | ||||
| Camel Milk | -1 | +1 | |||||
| Carrot | -1 | +1 | |||||
| Piece of Chicken | -1 | +2 | +1 | ||||
| Date | +2 | +1 | -1 | -1 | |||
| Garlic | -3 | +2 | +1 | +1 | |||
| Honey | |||||||
| Leek | -1 | +1 | |||||
| Mutton | +2 | -1 | -1 | ||||
| Onion | -2 | +1 | |||||
| Rabbit Meat | -1 | +2 | -1 | ||||
| Fish (all) | -1 | +1 | +1 | -1 | |||
| Barley/malt (all) | +1 | -1 | |||||
| Bleeding Hand | -1 | -1 | -2 | +2 | |||
| Cat Nip | +1 | -2 | +1 | ||||
| Colt's Foot | +1 | -2 | |||||
| Dead Tongue | +1 | -2 | +1 | ||||
| Dung Rot | -1 | +3 | -2 | ||||
| Earth Light | -2 | +1 | +1 | ||||
| Eye of Osiris | -2 | +2 | |||||
| Hairy Tooth | +1 | +1 | -2 | ||||
| Heart of Ash | +2 | -2 | |||||
| Iron Knot | +3 | -2 | -2 | ||||
| Nature's Jug | -1 | -1 | -1 | -1 | -2 | -1 | -1 |
| Salt Water Fungus | +1 | +1 | -2 | +1 | |||
| Sand Spore | +2 | -1 | -2 | ||||
| Slave's Bread | +1 | +1 | -2 | ||||
| Toad Skin | +1 | +1 | -3 | ||||
| Acorn's Cap | -3 | +1 | +1 | +1 | |||
| Brain | -1 | -2 | -2 | +2 | +2 | ||
| Camels Mane | +1 | +1 | -3 | ||||
| Cobra Hood | -1 | -1 | -2 | +3 | |||
| Dueling Serpents | -1 | -1 | +3 | -2 | |||
| Fish Hook | +2 | +2 | -1 | -1 | -1 | -1 | -1 |
| Heaven's Torrent | +3 | -1 | -1 | -2 | |||
| Nefertari's Crown | -3 | +3 | -1 | -1 | |||
| Peasant's Foot | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 | +1 |
| Pool of Tranquility | +1 | +1 | -3 | +1 | +1 | +1 | |
| Razor's Edge | +1 | +1 | -3 | ||||
| Ra's Awakening | -1 | +3 | -1 | -1 | -1 | ||
| Scorpions Brood | +3 | -1 | -1 | -1 | -1 | ||
| Malagueta | +1 | ||||||
| Oshosho | +1 | ||||||
| Ukpo | +1 | ||||||
| Korerima | +1 | ||||||
| Roobios | +1 | ||||||
| Baobab | +1 | ||||||
| Kuka | +1 | ||||||
| Food: | Str | Dex | End | Spd | Con | Foc | Per |
Next, here's how duration works. This requires understanding how the number of servings that a meal gives is calculated. Each ingredient has a fill value that determines how many servings each multiple of it is. To find how many servings the meal will be, for each ingredient, multiply the quantity of the ingredient in the meal by the fill value, and then add up this quantity for all ingredients in the meal. Finally, take the integer part of this to get the number of servings. The fill values are as follows:
The duration is determined by nutrition. Each ingredient has a base nutrition value. To find the nutrition of a meal, take the nutrition of an ingredient, multiply by the fill value of the ingredient, and multiply by the quantity of the ingredient in the meal. Do this for all ingredients in the meal and add them up, then divide the total by the number of servings in the meal. Multiply the final nutrition value by 3 to get the number of seconds that the meal stats will last. The base nutrition values for various foods are:
The fill values and nutrition for the spices listed above are for Kuka. Not wanting to waste them, I haven't tried the others. Regardless, they shouldn't comprise a large enough proportion of a meal to be significant, anyway.
Finally, let's talk about flavor. Flavor is a pairwise phenomenon, and it makes no sense to say that a particular ingredient has high flavor on its own. The flavor of a meal starts at 100, and then there is a modifier added for each pair of ingredients in the meal. In particular, any meal with only one ingredient has no pairs of ingredients, and so it will have 100 flavor.
The modifier depends on which ingredients are involved and what proportion of the meal they constitute. For example, the modifier for a 35% abdju, 35% camel pair is +21. If the proportions of the ingredients are sufficiently small, the modifier will be 0, regardless of the ingredients. In practice, the additives that have only one of a given ingredient added for the base stats constitute a sufficiently small proportion of the meal to not affect flavor, apart from taking up space.
The easiest way to find food bases to use is to just take ready-made ones that have already been discovered. These aren't necessarily the best possible (in fact, they probably aren't the best possible), but they are the best currently known. Flavor is still not well-understood, but a good amount of theory went into producing the ones below.
Because the food bases allow only fixed amounts of space left for additives, the number of additives per multiple of the base is limited. In order to add the number of other ingredients you want, take the number of ingredients you want to add, and divide it by the additive rating for the food base you are going to use. Any integer multiple of the base no smaller than the number you get (strictly larger if you do not get an integer) will work. The exception is making much larger meals with food bases deliberately designed for small meals; if you are going to do this, it is better to choose a different food base for higher flavor.
Also note that, when a food base requires mushrooms other than Nature's Jug, any other mushroom can be substituted. That will change the base stats of the meal, of course; don't put mushrooms that give negative modifiers to the stats you want in the base. I typically chose the cheapest mushrooms as the ones listed.
Base 1: 210 abdju+168 camel+105 phagrus+90 mutton+20 catfish
Flavor: 170
Base stats: +4 str, -3 end, +2 spd, +1 foc, -4 per
Servings: 464
Additives: 7
Duration: 4 minutes, 40 seconds
Uses: Large carry or constitution recipes
Base 2: 70 abdju+56 camel+35 phagrus+30 mutton
Flavor: 168
Base stats: +4 str, -2 end, +1 spd, -3 foc
Servings: 148
Additives: 9
Duration: 4 minutes, 44 seconds
Uses: Moderate sized carry or constitution recipes
Base 3: 2 abdju+2 camel+1 phagrus
Flavor: 152
Base stats: +2 str, -2 end, +2 spd, +1 foc, -3 per
Servings: 4
Additves: 5/7
Duration: 4 minutes, 30 seconds
Uses: Small carry, speed, focus, or constitution recipes
Base 4: 20 abdju+21 camel+6 mutton+6 CF+6 HT
Flavor: 166
Base stats: +4 str, +1 end, +1 spd, -4 con, -1 foc, -2 per
Servings: 34.7
Additives: 1
Duration: 5 minutes, 24 seconds
Uses: High-end endurance recipes
Base 5: 147 abdju+140 camel+63 mutton+60 CF
Flavor: 164
Base stats: +4 str, -2 con, -1 foc, -2 per
Servings: 254.5
Additives: 10
Duration: 5 minutes, 26 seconds
Uses: Cheaper large endurance recipes
Base 6: 70 abdju+56 camel+30 mutton+25 IK
Flavor: 156
Base stats: +7 str, -2 dex, -1 end, -2 con, -1 foc, -2 per
Servings: 115.5
Additives: 19
Duration: 5 minutes, 16 seconds
Uses: Small endurance recipes
Base 7: 42 camel+40 abdju+21 phagrus+15 perch
Flavor: 164
Base stats: +2 str, -3 end, +3 spd, +2 foc, -4 per
Servings: 97
Additives: 2
Duration: 4 minutes, 17 seconds
Uses: Large speed or focus recipes
Base 8: 14 abdju+14 camel+7 phagrus+4 CH
Flavor: 164
Base stats: +3 str, -1 dex, -4 end, +5 spd, +1 foc, -3 per
Servings: 28.4
Additives: 1
Duration: 4 minutes, 30 seconds
Uses: Large speed or focus recipes
Base 9: 21 camel+20 abdju+10 phagrus+6 CH
Flavor: 162
Base stats: +3 str, -1 dex, -4 end, +5 spd, +1 foc, -3 per
Servings: 41.1
Additives: 3
Duration: 4 minutes, 33 seconds
Uses: Moderate sized speed or focus recipes
Base 10: 28 abdju+15 IK+15 DT+15 EL+15 CF+15 TS
Flavor: 150
Base stats: +4 str, +1 spd, -11 con, +3 foc
Servings: 35.5
Additives: 2
Duration: 3 minutes, 25 seconds
Uses: High perception/focus combination recipes
Base 11: 42 dates+27 milk+21 honey+8 malt
Flavor: 136
Base stats: +2 str, +1 dex, -1 end, -1 spd, -1 con, +1 per
Servings: 8.95
Additives: 2
Duration: 13 minutes, 6 seconds
Uses: High perception recipes, reasonably long lasting recipes
Base 12: 14 abdju+14 camel+6 mutton+5 perch
Flavor: 164
Base stats: +4 str, -2 end, +1 spd, -3 per
Servings: 29
Additives: 1
Duration: 5 minutes, 4 seconds
Uses: Cheap relatively high stat recipes
Base 13: 112 camel+63 mutton+60 IK+60 DT+60 TS+60 CF
Flavor: 152
Base stats: +8 str, -1 spd, -9 con
Servings: 111.5
Additives: 5
Duration: 8 minutes, 8 seconds
Uses: Longer lasting high stat recipes
Base 14: 10 dates+5 honey+2 raw malt+2 light malt+2 medium malt+2 dark malt
Flavor: 130
Base stats: +2 str, +1 dex, +3 end, -1 spd, -4 con
Servings: 1.15
Additives: 1/2
Duration: 20 minutes, 28 seconds
Uses: High perception recipes, long lasting recipes
Base 15: 4 dates+1 honey
Flavor: 122
Base stats: +2 str, +1 dex, -1 end, -1 spd
Servings: .25
Additives: 5/7
Duration: 29 minutes
Uses: Long lasting recipes
Base 16: 11 Nature's Jug+1 Iron Knot
Flavor: 102
Base stats: +2 str, -3 dex, -1 end, -1 spd, -4 con, -1 foc, -1 per
Servings: 1.2
Additives: 1/2
Duration: 46 minutes, 15 seconds
Uses: Extremely long lasting (low stat) recipes
--- New 170 flavor base: 210 abdju+168 camel+105 phagrus+90 mutton+20 catfish = 170 flavor
That allows 7 additives per multiple, leaving about 1.17% of the base free for additives, as opposed to only 0.5%. The only difference between that and the old base is a little less catfish. Unlike the previous one, here you cannot substitute mushrooms for the catfish. ---
The way that meals are usually done is to start by determining the sort of meal you want, such as a carry recipe, endurance recipe, or so forth. Decide whether higher stats or longer duration are more important (usually the former), and how large of a recipe you want to make. From these, it will usually be clear which of the above food bases to use.
Choosing the type of recipe you want usually makes it obvious which additives belong in the recipe. The only real complication is that sometimes you have to choose to leave some out, because either they're too hard to get, or too expensive.
From there, determine how many multiples of the base you need to add from the number of additives. Choose how large the base will be, making it at least as large as necessary. Put in the ingredients for the base, one of each additive, cook, and serve.
Much of the work presented here is my own, but many other people have helped with parts of it. The fill values were copied directly from someone else's thread. The discovery that the food stats are multiplied by flavor is also a non-trivial one originally discovered by someone else, though I'm not sure who. Just so that I don't spend another page trying to explain who did exactly what: