Cooking Guide

Cooking is a great production skill that can be useful for players of any class. In the early game, it is an easy way to make money, and later on it can be used to produce foods that restore vigor and cure scurvy. Some foods even benefit your entire fleet! Interested? Read on to find out how to quickly train your cooking skill.

Getting Started
Portugal and The Netherlands have the most abundant cooking resources, giving cooks from these countries an advantage since they are able to buy greater quantities of materials at lower prices in their home countries. However, there are many options in cooking, so it is still very accessible to players from any country.

Skills

 * Cooking
 * Livestock Trading
 * Food Trading (recommended)
 * Accounts (recommended)

Jobs
Animal Trader is the only job which favors all of these skills and is therefore the ideal class for beginning your cooking career. To become an Animal Trader, use a Merchant Guild Card at any Merchant GM to change jobs. If you do not have a Merchant Guild Card, you can obtain one from The Merchant Guild's Predicament quest, available randomly from Merchant Mediators in the major cities once you have reached 500 trade fame. It is possible to cook under any job as long as you can obtain the cooking skill, however, it will be more difficult to advance your cooking skill without support from the livestock and food trading skills. See the individual skill pages for info on other jobs that favor them and requirements for getting the skills when not favored.

Recipe books
In addition to the cooking skill, recipe books are required in order to cook. Which books you use will depend partly on your home country and personal preference, though everyone can start with the Simple recipes book, which can be purchased in Palma or Bordeaux or acquired for free from "the city's first epicurean" quest. Some books can only be found in certain cities, and rarer books require significant investment in a city before they become available. More info about recipe books can be found in the relevant sections below.

Recipes

 * Simple recipes (Palma, Bordeaux, the city's first epicurean)
 * Livestock secrets - Pigs (Porto)
 * Livestock secrets - Sheep (optional, Amsterdam)
 * Makeable Meats (optional, Genoa)

Levels 1 - 2
Purchase Simple recipes from Palma or Bordeaux for 5,000 D. Optionally, if you find the city's first epicurean quest at the Merchant Guild you can obtain the book for free. Portuguese players can buy from wheat from Porto, and Spanish can buy wheat from Seville, though it may be worthwhile to sail between the two since they are close. Mill the wheat into flour and sell it. Of note, flour seems to hold a pretty constant price no matter where you go, which is nice.

Level 3
Purchase Livestock secrets - Pigs from Porto for 5,000 D. Pigs are available in Faro and Gijon. Pork is available in Porto. Lard makes quite a profit, especially for Portuguese players.

Level 4
Buy pigs as before. You can now make pork into bacon, but it's worth considering sticking with lard because you can produce up to 3 barrels of lard per barrel of pork, compared to only 2 for bacon.

Level 5 - 6
Buy pigs as before. You can now make either Ham or Sausages. Check the rates at the markets closest to you and make note of the prices and which cities are already selling Ham or Sausage, since that halves your selling price.

Level 7 - 10
(optional)

If you're tired of butchering pigs or want something else to supplement, you can try your hand at Roast Lamb using the Makeable Meats book from Genoa.