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[Vic]

First post here, though I am an old fan of the game. If you read this toady, I love you!


There has always been a bit of an issue with cooking, the "dwarven wine biscuit situation". Every kind of food is classified the same, leading to dishes made out of just alcohol or just tallow.

My suggestion would be to put every foodstuff into one of three categories, similar to materials. These categories would be:

Standard, representing generally low-quality but high quantity foodstuffs. Examples would include plump helmets, flour and meat. These add their entire quantity to the produced meal.

Special, representing higher quality and stranger foodstuffs. Meant to represent things giving taste to the dis,h these would include some milled plants, rarer plants, tallow and possibly some kinds of rare meat. These add their entire quantity to the produced meal.

Spice, representing high quality foodstuffs that do not give actual substance to the meal. These would include alcohol, sugar, and milled spices. These add half of their quantity to the produced meal, but still all of their quality.


Every meal has to include at least one standard foodstuff, to avoid the dwarf wine biscuit situation. An example of how the kitchen menu could work:

Simple meal: One standard and one special OR spice

Standard meal: One standard, one special and one special OR spice

Lavish meal: Two standard, one special, one spice and one special OR spice

There could also be a custom meal, allowing you to create truly decadent feasts of up to five ingredients like honey roasted dragon roast in sauce of plump helmet wine and bulbroot powder.

[Labs]

Sounds like a great idea. +1

[andrea]

good suggestion. simple and it does what it is meant to do.
nice first post.
also, this suggestion makes me hungry

[Derakon]

Revamping food is in the works. There's plenty of old threads on this topic.

[tsen]

Looks good to me! Would be even better if we had a relatively robust system of tags for the RAWs so we could organize meals for different species. Tags for:
1. base material
2. cooking method (same skill, just changes the wording for flavor)
3. spice type (say, sweet, bitter, salty, savory)

Far more complicated than is truly NECESSARY, but isn't that what DF is all about? 

[Enzo]

2. cooking method (same skill, just changes the wording for flavor)

...delicious pun?   

[Aspgren]

also, this suggestion makes me hungry

Me too. I'm getting some -*Instant noodles, chicken flavor*- base value ¤5 ...anyone else want some?

[sweitx]

I like this idea.  However, for spice, maybe we shouldn't use up the entire stack for one unit of food.  Maybe 1 unit of spice can "spice up" 5 units of food.

Looks good to me! Would be even better if we had a relatively robust system of tags for the RAWs so we could organize meals for different species. Tags for:
1. base material
2. cooking method (same skill, just changes the wording for flavor)
3. spice type (say, sweet, bitter, salty, savory)

Far more complicated than is truly NECESSARY, but isn't that what DF is all about? 

I like the idea of having different name.  Also, the cooking method could simply just change the verb from "minced" to something else, maybe depending on food type (solid or liquid).  And I'm pretty sure this is covered before, but reiterated here for clarity.  Preparation method should separate to two different staged, the food prep and the cooking method.
Pick one from any of the list
Stuff in parenthesis are what to pick when no prep is chosen.

Base Prep (right before base):
Chopped
Minced
Diced
Sliced
Ground
(Whole)

Spice Prep(after base):
Marinated in...
Covered in...
Breaded in...
Basted with...
()

Cooking Method (prefix):
Baked
Grilled
Fried in (require tallow/fat, postfix)
Boiled
Boiled in (some form of liquid, postfix)
(Raw)

Example:
This is an excellently prepared meat pie.  It is made with Baked Chopped dog meat Marinated in Dwarven Wine, Minced muskox meat fried in dog tallow, and Boiled Whole goblin basted with goblin blood.

Of course, need to figure out the naming system to name the meal based on its prep method.

[praguepride]

I wish I had the time to search through everything to post proof, but this idea is already on Toady's development plan. He mentioned seperating things like alcohol and seeds from meat and flour products.

I think it's one of the Required/Bug fixes section

[LordDemon]

I think we need an option to mix meats, to create new "base foods" (mixing cheap and expensive meat for example to create more average meat).

How else are we going to end up with the Monty Pythonesque meal made of spam, spam, spam, spam and plump helmets?

[vadia]

apologies for bringing this back from the dead;

but I think that for better meals one needs to use some sort of fuel (wood or charcoal -- NOT COKE {unless you mean cocaine, whereas I suppose you could cook with coke, but your dwarves would be high)

So I'm thinking
fancy preservation  = (main ingredient) + (special ingredient)/(spice)
meal = (main ingredient) + (special ingredient)/(spice) + (fuel)
nice meal = add another ingredient/spice
fancy = add 2

The fuel could be in fractional units (say 1/10 a log or charcoal bar)

[tsen]

1 unit of fuel could "charge" the kitchen for a certain number of meals or preparation steps or what have you.

[Valid_Dark]

I agree that the prepared food system needs a revisit,

Also, and more importantly in my opinion, the value multiplier of prepared food needs to be lowered.  That should be a quick fix that could be done in a few minutes, and would make a huge difference in how people play.
atm Crafts are almost worthless compared to prepared food, giving you no reason to make crafts or other 'tradegoods'.