Cooking strategy
Eating quality food is crucial to maximizing your adventures each day and to gaining stats quickly. Thus, unless you're rich enough to have all your meals catered, cooking quality food is equally crucial. This is what makes the Pastamancer and, less directly, Sauceror classes so appealing, since their skills of Pastamastery and Advanced Saucecrafting make available some far superior recipes.
Since your stomach can only hold so much each day, your diet must be chosen wisely, and you must choose based on exactly what you want to accomplish. Read on for discussions and handy references that will help you cook smart and eat smart for better living.
This section was inspired by Cocktailcrafting, which was ported from the Bartending Guide originally written by ePeterso2. Grateful acknowledgment is given to the data from the KoL Item Effects website run by Ohayou. -PWMoE
Fullness and You
Each food item has a fixed fullness number. When you eat it, your fullness counter is increased by that amount. If you try to eat food that would increase the counter beyond its limit, you will be told that you are "too full", and nothing will happen. The counter resets to zero at each rollover. The limit is normally 15, although the Stomach of Steel skill increases it to 20. It is temporarily increased by an additional 15 during the Feast of Boris.
Fullness is the cornerstone of cooking strategy. Unlike drunkenness, there is no visible indication of the fullness gained by each item (nor of your current fullness), so it's important to know how much fullness each food fills and plan your day's diet so no fullness is wasted.
Because of this limited fullness, it is important to get the most adventures per fullness -- lasagnas are the best choice in this case, and you can choose between gnat lasagna, long pork lasagna, and fishy fish lasagna. Best Foods (adventures) may be of assistance if you are unable to cook lasagnas.
There is also one special consideration when thinking about fullness - in PvP matches, one of the possible contests is pie-eating, in which the character with the least fullness wins (however, the pie-eating contest does not actually increase your fullness counter - either it's just a thinking-about-pie-eating contest, or there's some binge-and-purge action going on). So, if you have a smashed hippy stone, it is in your best interest to wait until just before rollover to eat, leaving you with an empty stomach all day long. In doing so, you must also make sure you do not have too many adventures before rollover, since they will be reduced if they exceed the limit of 200.
Racking up Spices
Every ambitious cook will eventually hit the same snag: running out of spices. Spices are found somewhere in many of the best recipes—Key lime pies being a notable exception—and are useful in Cocktailcrafting as well, so there just never seems to be enough to go around.
There are several ways to keep your spice rack stocked. Bad ways include drops in The Spooky Forest and random fishing in The Sewer. The easy way is to buy them in The Mall of Loathing, if your level and meat permit. (As of this writing, spices are in the 500-1000 range.) They can also be found (along with several other cooking staples) in Knob Kitchen grab-bags, which are obtained from adventuring in the Kitchens with a ten-leaf clover in your inventory. Another fairly effective way is going for the Zest! Adventure in the Pirate's Cove.
A nerfed strategy, The Spice Loop, allowed players to obtain spices at the cost of 30 meat, and 1 turn.
Cooking al Dente
Before we get down to brass tacks (i.e., charts full of math), you need to know about the special skills required to cook the very best foods. Advanced Saucecrafting, a Sauceror skill, is used to create scrumptious reagents, and is required to cook anything out of them. However, the results are generally not food. Most of them are potions, details of which are on the scrumptious reagent page. The other reagent recipes make sauces, of which only Hell broth is edible. Don't eat it. Trust me; just don't.
On the other hand, Pastamastery, a Pastamancer skill, produces and cooks dry noodles, resulting in a variety of very nice dishes. Here are some diagrams, because even if you have neither skill, gathering the ingredients may help you trade Pastamancers and Saucerors for their wares. Especially the reagents and noodles; many chefs are happy to give you sauces or pastas for a fairly small fee if they don't have to use up their own precious stock of magical ingredients. Do note that noodles can also be obtained from the Kitchens, while reagents can also be obtained from the Laboratory.
To get the most adventures from the food, consider that chow meins give you 5 adventures per fullness, reagent pastas 4 adventures per fullness, and spectral pickles (and grue egg omelettes, quest items with equivalent stats) and Retenez L'Herbe Paté 6 adventures per fullness. The cost effectiveness (as of April 2006) of chow meins is about 1.3k per fullness, reagent pastas about 750-1000 per fullness, and pickles and patés are 15k-20k per fullness.
Basic pastas
Lo meins
Chow meins
Chow meins give you 5 adventures per fullness point.
Hi meins
Hi meins give you 5 adventures per fullness, stats in all three categories, and 5 adventures of an elemental breath skill.
Lasagnas
Lasagna gives you 5.5 adventures per fullness and stats in one category.
Reagent Pastas
Reagent food gives you 4 adventures per fullness point.
