I have an idea: Sausages! When an animal is butchered, nearly a dozen meat products are created, most of them in small stacks. Realistically, most of those would spoil quickly, unless processed by drying, smoking etc. So here is how sausage enters the picture: you grab all that misc edible stuff that's not a big appetizing slab of smoked ham, chop them up, mix them with some spices and stuff them into guts (or some synthetic equivalent). Delicious stuff made of things you'd probably never eat in their true form!
So how it would work in DF? Very much like making bread: the product is more valuable than the sum of the ingredients, and it's edible raw AND available for further cooking while some ingredients aren't. The process also increases stock size, which is always good for storage.
I have two variants in mind:
-make sausage/salami: guts + meat + meat + meat (+... you get the idea) + milled spice
-and make blood sausage/black pudding: guts + meat (as many times as above) + blood + milled spice. Because the blood barrels brought by caravans will not be used by ordinary cooking as long as there's anything solid to cook, and require hideous amounts of micromanaging even when possible- so why not a reaction that just uses them?
It would take place either at the Butcher's shop or the Kitchen, using either Butchery or Cooking skill. The product would take it's name from the first meat ingredient, or if possible only which animal it's made of (Cave Croc Sausage instead of Juicy Cave Croc Eyeballs Sausage). The product would be classified as Cheese or Bone Meal or whatever that can be cooked as long as it's not meat, to avoid sausages made into sausages. If it's impossible to differentiate between guts and other meaty stuff, either use some plant fiber as casing or just accept that dwarves can make sausages out of meat, spice and the optional blood without casings, just as they can brew alcohol of only plants and a barrel (they are just so badass
).
So, could someone please translate it to code? Deon, do you like it?