Cookery

Crafting skill

With a high cookery skill, your food will be more delicious and more nutritious, and also more valuable in trade. You will very rarely get a skill up from roasting meat. You will usually get a skill up from making flatbread, soup, dried meat, smoked meat, or other recipes.

This is a vital skill for survival in the Unreal world. Cooked food has five grades: awful, bland, normal (no indicator), tasty and delicious. These grades affect nutrition, but so slightly as to be unnoticeable.

Herbs, leaves and seeds can be used as seasoning in several recipes.

Note: containers of same kind of stew or soups can be poured into each other to have a full one. Example: Cook 3 pots of meat stew to have 3 4-pound pots. Mixing each other to have 2 full ones.
Roasted meat
Basic processing of food, spoils in a matter of days unless stored in a cellar, but still spoils fast. Intended for near-future consumption. Takes from 30 minutes to an hour to prepare. Roasted food lasts longer than boiled food. (note: only boil/beverage spoil-time tried, about 2-3 days less than roast)
-Raw meat (10 pieces/cuts per batch)
-Fire

Dried meat
Best way of food preservation as it takes a very long time before it spoils. The process takes 25 days.
-Raw meat or fish
-Dry and cold weather (October to April)
-A place for drying (wall of a building, side of a shelter)
-Knife
-Tying equipment
-Dried and smoked food weighs much less than salted, roasted and boiled food (6lb pike-perches weigh 2lbs smoked)

Smoked meat
Somewhere between dried and salted in terms of longetivity. Takes 16 days to process.
-Raw meat or fish (only big fish, e.g. salmon, trout etc.)
-Heated room (a room with a fireplace/sauna)
-Tying equipment

Salted meat
Worst of the the long-term preservation methods but still takes a decent amount of time before the food spoils. A bag of salt is quite an expensive item. You can preserve up to 120 cuts of meat with one 12 lbs bag. The process takes 5 days.
-Raw meat or fish
-Knife
-Salt

Boil / Herbal beverages
Raw ingredients (any unprepared meat, fish, mushrooms, berries, vegetables or herbs)
-Fire
-Cooking pot
-Water

Boiling meats and fishes are also the best way to process low nutritious species like elks or pikes. 12 pounds of elk meats or pike fish can be boiled down to a pot of 6 pound, making each bite more nutritious than a piece of roasted meat or fish.

Herbal beverage, aka Boiling plants, can be used as drinks with various restotative or simulating qualities, PROVIDED that you have necessary herbs. They also, less frequently, can be used as seasonings in certain dishes.