So your character has a cooking skill. What dishes can he prepare? What will be inedible? What does that mean? Adaptable all systems.

It was surprisingly hard to find a good illustration to go with this article. I didn’t want meat to dominate, I did want a variety of ingredients to be visible, and I insisted that there should be evidence of some sort of process having been followed. The cake above ticks all of those boxes. Image by Marina Pacurar from Pixabay.

We’ve all grown up with the concept of a recipe being utterly reliable. If you do the same thing every time, you will get the same result, every time.

Most of us take this completely for granted, never realizing how miraculous it is that any recipe works at all, never mind being as safe as houses.

If ever a recipe doesn’t produce the intended result, either the recipe is wrong, or we haven’t followed it properly.

As a result, if we think of it at all, we have extreme difficulty adjusting our thought processes to a world where this is not the case.

And yet, for most of human history, it wasn’t so.

Measurement Failure

I have a small collection of cookbooks, one of which is Barbara Lowery’s 1977 work, “Quick & Easy Cookbook”, which I picked up cheaply from a garage sale – I won’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of either book nor author.

It offers information right up front that you simply don’t find in most cookbooks about the standard weights and measures used in different countries.

In Australia, 1 standard cup is 250 millilitres. Same in New Zealand. But in the US, 1 standard cup is 237 ml, and in Canada, 227. So if you’re trying to follow a US recipe and put a 250 ml cup of liquid into your recipe, that’s 5.485% too much liquid.

1 standard tablespoon is 20 ml – in Australia. In New Zealand, it’s 15 ml; in the US, it’s 14.8 ml; and in Canada, it’s 14.2.

1 standard teaspoon is 5 ml in Australia and New Zealand, 4.9 ml in America, and 4.74 ml in Canada.

Heaven only knows what these measures are in other parts of the world. Yet, very seldom do recipes state what part of the world they have used standard measurements from.

How on earth can any recipe be expected to work with more than 1-in-20 variations in what amount a standard “cup”” is?

Ingredient Variations

A recipe might call for three oranges. But there are innumerable types of Oranges, and they are not the same. Not only will the variety most readily available locally probably be different in different places, but there can be a huge size variation from one variety to another.

There will also be size variations depending on where you are with respect to the growing season. Here in Australia, the Mandarin season is past; what few Mandarins are now on offer come, generally, from the US, and most of them are very small even compared to the same variety (when it’s available) from a local source.

The same is true of all sorts of fruit and tomatoes and pumpkins, and the list goes on and on.

But these things also change over time. I’m old enough to remember when Mangoes were a rare and expensive treat – but they became popular here, and so lots of people started growing them. In several different varieties. So they are now commonplace in the summer months. Heck, I remember Kiwifruit coming to Australia for the first time, and when Lychees were rare and unusual.

I have seen passionfruit the size of large oranges (about three inches in diameter, compared to a more typical 1 1/4 inches in diameter). I have seen grapefruit that are smaller than that – and some that were three times that size. The typical size is probably about 8-10″ in diameter – but you have to allow for seasonal variation and different varieties.

Tomatoes four or five inches across are not uncommon at certain times of year. Right now, most are a bit less than 2″ across, and some are only 75% of that size.

So, when a recipe calls for three pears – what exactly do they mean, if they don’t say, specifically?

Organic Variation

But it gets worse. All organic products have a natural variation in size – these days, everything gets sorted and sold according to size, so that you get ‘medium eggs’ and ‘large eggs’ and so on (you don’t often see small eggs here, for some reason).

No matter what variety of organic matter you’re talking about – chickens or steaks or cherries – there will be a natural variation in size.

These details are rarely even hinted at in recipes – though, to be fair, I have seen some that specified large eggs. Most of the time, they simply don’t say.

Ingredient Lifespan

Herbs and spices lose strength and flavor with astonishing speed.

From my notes for a future installment of the Value Of Material Things series:

Most of these lose 1/2 their freshness and flavor every 6-12 months (with the lower end more common). It’s possible that some methods of preservation – boiling the herbs in oil to extract the flavor into the oil for example – might evade this reality. Some will also work well in a vinegar solution – mint, for example.

A suspension of spice in honey might also work.

But such heroic methods notwithstanding, the rule of thumb remains 1/2 flavor every 6 months.

BUT… every spice is a little different.

The best resource that I’ve found on the subject is the EATBYDATE site – here’s a link to their spices page.

So, if a recipe calls for 4 cloves of Garlic or 10g of Turmeric – the actual strength, the amount of active ingredient, is never going to be the same. how can a recipe possibly be reliable?

And that’s with the best modern preservative techniques. Take a step back to an older time when it took months, not days or weeks, to import spices from some far-off exotic land, and uncertainty only grows – exponentially.

Which means the exact same recipe from, say, 1918, could have entirely different measurements of key ingredients to the same recipe published last week – simply because those ingredients are now fresher and more concentrated, so you don’t need as much of them.

Which suddenly reminds of reading somewhere that eggs were about 20% smaller in the 19th century and the start of the 20th than what was common in the 1970s through to today. Along with most other forms of fruit and veg.

In a nutshell, we have better fertilizers and better farm management.

Scaling Failures

If I hadn’t seen this happen on Masterchef with my own two eyes on multiple occasions, I wouldn’t have credited it – but people have real problems scaling their recipes up.

If you know you need 1 lb of butter for 1 cake, and you are baking 50, that’s a fairly simple calculation. If a typical serving has 2 lb of steak, and you’re preparing 30 servings, you might think that 60 lb of steak would be enough.

It won’t be. It’s hard to be completely consistent in size, and that makes it hard to be consistent in weight – and that means that you will end up a few serves short from 60 lb. On top of that, there will be different amounts that have to be trimmed, and the need for testing along the way, and reserves to cover for any accidents – you might get away with another 5%, but an extra 10% is probably safer.

Thermal Reliability

Look up any source or site about how to cook and it won’t be long before you’re talking about temperatures. The Lowery cookbook has a table which lists the old-style descriptive labels and their equivalents in °C and °F – a “Cool” Oven is 100°C or 200°F, for example. The temperatures rise by a steady 25°C for a while, then go up by 10, and then 20 for a while, and then 10 again. So there is no discernible pattern beyond each being hotter than the one before.

Just before that list, it states, “Oven temperatures vary according to make; therefore the table … gives only a general guide to temperatures of Electric Ovens. If using a gas oven … decrease the given temperature by 10°C (25°F).”

Back then, as now, oven temperatures are set by turning a dial to the desired temperature – but how accurate are those dials and the temperature that they induce within the oven? Hence, the advice about ovens being different from one manufacturer to another. 200°C dial-indicated might be 185, or 210.

These days, though, the dials are often not pre-set – instead, you are setting the thresholds at which the actual temperature will be held – at least on the better models of oven. And (until opening this book, I’d never heard of the need to decrease gas oven temperatures by 10 degrees – which I guess means that those have become more reliable, too.

Also in modern times, we have fan-forced ovens, which are generally (effectively) a lot hotter than the indicated temperatures – you need less heat for the same result.

Wood…

But let’s look back a little. I’ve never cooked anything serious in a wood-fired oven, but have talked with others who have, and they have a number of peculiar things to report. First, most of them don’t have any sort of thermometer – you have to know what the general temperature is from the way the things being cooked respond.

Second, temperatures will spike when a log is well ablaze, moderate but stay fairly consistent when you have glowing embers, and be quite variable any other time. Knowing when to add fuel to the fire, and how much, was as much a part of cooking in the olden days as measuring ingredients was in the 20th century.

Third, almost all ovens and stoves will have a unique ‘personality’ of their own – parts that are hotter, parts that are cooler (if you’ve ever noticed, you get the same thing happening in Refrigerators – some shelves will be cooler than others).

I don’t know if the same is true of coal-burning stoves – but I expect it might be.

So temperatures are at best an unreliable setting – at least with modern equipment, they are consistent.

Or are they? Many electrical components change over time – and the elements of ovens are no different. Gas is more consistent, unless one or more nozzles gets blocked – which can happen. So,while you won’t notice any difference between this year and last year, when the interval clocks up to 10 or 25 years, you might.

The Cooking Process

Let’s talk about the cooking process for a minute, because it’s relevant. The temperature at which you set your oven is determined by how quickly the heat gets from the exterior of whatever is being cooked to its interior. Raise the temperature, and the outside will cook a lot more quickly (being exposed directly to the greater heat), while the temperatures in the interior will rise more slowly because the heat has to work it’s way through from the outside.

It’s the exact opposite with a microwave oven, where the heat is greatest in the interior, and least around the outside – but it is possible (I know first-hand) to misconfigure a microwave so that the outside cooks while the inside is still frozen. It’s a black art, sometimes!

Some recipes call for turning ovens up or down after so much cooking time – and that’s the reason: avoiding the outside being overcooked while the inside is underdone.

IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING, you can tweak cooking times by varying the temperature in the oven – somewhat.

Most people blindly follow the recipe.

Time

Until mechanically-‘reliable’ temperature controls came around, cooking times were a broad approximation. Skewers were used to test whether or not cakes were baked in the center and probably still are, to be honest. An experienced cook could also tell how much a protein had broken down from the resistance to such testing; the ordinary cook had to rely on external indications like “the crust is a golden brown”.

It’s perhaps a good thing that such flexibility was achieved because reliable timers weren’t around for a long while. There were (literally) hourglasses and the like, but reliable timepieces were expensive even after their development in the 1500s.

Navigation was a spur that helped improve timekeeping, and the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656 was a major step forward – but they cost the equivalent of several months wages for the average worker, so they were not something the ordinary person could afford.

The factory manufacturing of precision parts in the mid-19th century, 200 years later, was what made timekeeping affordable and reasonably reliable. A major spur to the manufacturing of accurate timepieces was the rise of the railways; every station needed an accurate clock to synchronize timetables. This created enough demand from 1840 on to industrialize the creation of clocks, and that opened up the domestic markets.

Cuckoo clocks actually led the way, appearing in homes from the 1700s – at first, just those of the wealthy, and then slowly spreading down the economic span. I can see a number of influences prompting this rise – factory and shift workers who needed to start at certain times; the railroads, and the need for intending passengers to be at the station before the train was due; and the popularization of radio, and of specific programming that became a fixture of daily life.

Cooking is nowhere on that list, really. Temperatures weren’t reliable and consistent enough for cooking times to standardize, even within the one recipe, until the 1930s and 40s.

There’s No Substitute For…

With so much vagueness about every aspect of the cooking process – ingredients, quantities, temperatures, and times – I think I’ve proven my initial point: it’s a miracle that any recipe ever worked!

The earliest known recipe was recorded on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, for me-e puhadi, a lamb stew, somewhere around 1730BCE. But they are more a list of ingredients, without cooking instructions or measurements. In fact, the oldest written recipes that we would regard as such by modern standards were for beer.

… Experience

The cook had to make the difference, compensating and adjusting for all the variables to produce something edible on a reasonably reliable basis. To enable them to do that, most had little more than their experience as a cook, plus some basic training passed down through the generations.

Every failure and every success have the potential to teach something. The smarter the cook, the more likely it is that they learn from these experiences, but there’s no mechanism in most games to simulate that; instead, it is normally used to justify improvements in a skill level that are acquired through some other mechanism.

… Genius Instinct

Most systems add a stat-based value to whatever learned expertise a character has in a skill, and in cooking, this allows for instinctively moving beyond experience and applying expertise generally and indirectly to the task(s) at hand.

In part, this is abstracting specific lessons into general principles and then applying them deliberately, but most of it is doing so subconsciously – and some of it is sheer natural talent.

Put all these elements together and you can sum it up as a Genius instinct – if there’s enough of it.

… Personal Flair

On top of that, every cook develops their own style over time, a personal flair if you will. It’s really hard to describe exactly what that means, but fortunately, I have a source that I can fall back on – a passage from Pawn Of Prophecy, the first novel in David Eddings’ series The Belgariad:

     The center of the kitchen and everything that happened there was Aunt Pol. She seemed somehow to be able to be everywhere at once. The finishing touch that plumped a goose in its roasting pan or deftly shaped a rising loaf or garnished a ham fresh from the oven was always hers. Though there were several others who worked in the kitchen, no loaf, stew, soup, roast, or vegetable ever went out that had not been touched at least once by Aunt Pol. She knew by smell, taste, or some higher instinct what each dish required, and she seasoned them all by pinch or trace or a negligent-seeming shake from earthenware spice pots. It was as if there was a kind of magic about her, a knowledge and power beyond that of ordinary people.

Personal Flair is an ability to stamp your own signature on a dish, a personal style that goes beyond simply making something flavorsome to make this particular version undeniably and recognizably your own.

This, too, is something that genius can extend beyond dishes that the cook already knows into general principles that can be applied to new products and ingredients.

So your character knows how to cook…

Congratulations!

So what does that mean, exactly?

Any interpretation of skill has to address all three of these elements, plus the fundamentals of edibility and reliability. I have such an interpretation to offer, based on a bricklaying model.

The diagrams above depict the significance of each point of skill and applied stat bonus, using the d20 / D&D / Pathfinder scale.

The yellow bricks are edibility, and they are the foundation. Fail in a roll badly enough, and this is the last line of defense for the cook; run out of these, and you are left with an undigestable mess.

The row above the yellow bricks is reliability, or – if you prefer – reproducability. Run out of these and what results will be a happy accident that may never be repeatable.

Above those foundations are the expertises. These may be a particular style of cooking (“Italian”, “French”), a particular type of dish (“Desserts”, “Soups”), a particular specific dish, enabling many variations and ingredient substitutions (“Pasta”, “Baked Dinner”, “Cake”), or Personal Flair, which gives you none of these, but which can substitute for any of them at need.

So, here’s how it works: Each rank adds a brick. You can’t add a brick unless the layer below it fully supports it.

• So rank+skill 1 gives you an edibility brick. rank+skill 2 gives you a second edibility brick. Rank+skill 3 gives you your first reliability brick. Each brick that is added is shown with an asterisk.
• 4 is a third edibility brick, 5 a second reliability brick, and 6 lets you choose one of the four areas of expertise – a cuisine in general, a broadly defined type of dish, a specific dish, or a touch of personal flair. The pyramid is now 3 layers and 6 bricks.
• But, we have run out of room, so brick 7 is another edibility, which permits brick 8 to be another reliability, and then brick 9 can be another area of expertise. And that creates a space for Brick 10 to be a third expertise.
• Bricks 11 and 12 are edibility and reliability, 13, 14, and 15 are areas of expertise.
• Starting with 16, something new gets added to the process – each point of rank+stat adds a bonus brick in the next available space in addition to the normal brick lay. These are shown with an up arrowhead and colored purple to make them stand out, but they are of the same type as the rest of the bricks in that row. So 16 is an edibility brick and the extra is a reliability brick. 17 is another expertise, and the bonus for 17 is also an expertise. 18 gives still another expertise and a bonus expertise, taking the total to 10. The cook also has 5 reliability and 6 edibility at this point. That fills the 6-row pyramid.
• Which means that the next time around, we again add an edibility and a bonus reliability at 19. Bricks 20 and 21, and their bonuses, are all expertise bricks. Brick 22 is an expertise and completes the 7th row of the pyramid, so the bonus has to be an edibility brick.
• 23 lays a reliability brick and a bonus expertise brick. 24 gives two more expertise bricks.
• At 25, we get to start adding a second extra – these are indicated by a circle and are colored red. All three of these bricks are additional expertise bricks, and complete the 8th row of the pyramid.
• For 26 (not shown), you would lay a normal edibility brick, a bonus reliability brick, and a second bonus expertise brick. 27 is three more expertise bricks, and so is 28, completing the 9-row pyramid. The cook now would have edibility 9, reliability 8, and expertise 30 (divided up into its four functions). And so on.

Standard practice is to roll a d20 and add the ranks and stat modifier to get a total, which has to exceed a target difficulty level. Difficulty levels have a base of 10, so if rank+skill are 11 less than the DC, the PC has a 50-50 chance of success because the die roll has to make up that 11-point deficit.

Skill Checks

Let us say, for the sake of example, that the character has Ranks+Skill equal to 15, which is to say, they are pretty good cooks, and that there is a DC of 20. He makes a skill check and rolls – well, let’s look at the outcome for various rolls, going from high to low.

• Rolls a 20: 20+15=35, which is 15 more than the DC. Success. Whatever the character is cooking, he gets to list it as a “signature dish” and thereafter can add his Personal Flair to his rolls as an additional bonus when making that specific dish.
• Rolls 15-19: Success. (15-19)+15=30-34, which is (10-14) more than the DC. It might not quite be a signature dish, but it’s appetizing – even delicious – and distinctly the work of this character.
• Rolls 6-14: Success. (6-14)+15=21-29, which is (1-9) more than the DC. Success. It’s an appetizing dish to a decreasing degree. At the lower end (roll of 6-9, say), those eating the dish start to wash it down, they have had enough of it.
• Roll of 5: 5+15=20, which is the exact number required. Success. It’s edible and distinctly yours. But few will be back for seconds.
• Roll of 4: 4+15=19, one short of success. Oh dear.
  • If the character has an appropriate expertise, that is enough to salvage this dish as something edible.
  • If not, then the first bricks to go are the reliability bricks. Since with this roll, the character only needs one of them, and has 5, he again salvages it.
• Rolls 2-3: 2+15=17, so 2 or 3 short of success. More reliability lost but the character has enough.
• Rolls a 1. Oh dear, oh dear. Not only is the roll 4 short of success, but the character can’t use reliability to get out of this mess; he has to use edibility. But he has 6 of those, so there will still be 2 left; the results are unpalatable but edible.

That seems pretty good. Now let’s look at a character with rank+skill=10, with the same DC.

• Roll of 20. 20+10=30, ten more than the target of 20, so it succeeds, and it’s a natural 20, so it’s now a Signature Dish. Next time, he can add his Personal Flair as a bonus, increasing his likelihood of success.
• Roll of 10-19: (10-19)+10=20-29, exactly what is needed or more, so these are all successes to varying degrees. On 10-13, characters eating it will need to wash it down to finish eating the dish, though.
• Roll of 9: 9+10=19, one less than needed.
  • If the dish belongs to an area of expertise, the character can use that to salvage the dish. It will be edible but not all that tasty.
  • If not, then the character has to use one of his 3 points of reliability to salvage something edible.
• Roll of 7-8: (7-8)+10=17, two or three less than needed. Salvageable, Edible.
• Roll of 6: 6+10=16, four short of what’s needed.
  • If the dish belongs to an area of expertise, the character can use that plus his three points of reliability to salvage the dish – barely.
  • If not, then the character has to use a point of edibility, of which he only has 4. This is definitely not up to his or her usual standards.
• Roll of 4-5: (4-5)+10=14-15, five or six short of what’s needed.
  • A point of expertise leaves four or five, respectively, to be found. Three of those come from reliability. One or two, respectively, have to come from edibility – but that still leaves some, so the character manages to salvage the situation, by the thinnest of margins.
  • Without that, two or three points have to come from edibility, respectively – but that still leaves 1, so again, the situation gets salvaged.
• Roll of 3: 3 +10 = 13, seven short of the target.
  • A point of expertise leaves six to find, three from reliability and three from edibility, leaving an edibility of 1. Salvageable – just barely.
  • Without that, the dish is down to zero edibility. No-one can eat it.
• Roll of 2, eight short of the target – not even a point of expertise can salvage this mess. It’s completely inedible.
• Roll of 1, nine short of the target and a natural 1: Not only can the character not use his three reliability to cushion the blow, not only is this a definitely inedible disaster at -5 edibility (or -4 with an expertise), the dish is so bad that the character loses that expertise if it applies. His confidence is wounded if not shattered so far as that area of expertise is concerned.

So, how realistic is this target of DC 20?

Circumstantial Modifiers

Again on the d20 scale employed by both D&D and Pathfinder:

Base DC: 10
DC+10 Extremely Difficult / Complicated Dish
DC+5 Difficult / Complicated Dish (included above)
DC+5 Exotic Ingredients
DC+5 Unusual Equipment
DC+5 Unfamiliar Style or Cuisine
DC+5 Shortage of time
DC+5 Other adverse circumstances
Maximum DC: 50

Turns out, it’s not all that unusual. There are many different ways of getting that as a DC. Cooking an unusual ingredient in someone else’s kitchen is enough.

Adjusting For The Hero System

The Hero System uses 3d6. Characters have to make a roll of ranks+9+stat/5, round up, or less, to succeed. Difficulty provides a negative modifier to this total.

Stats average 10. So ranks+11. Maximum “normal” is 25, so ranks+14.

Instead of +5 DC, the GM should apply -3 modifier (-6 for an extremely difficult or complicated dish). The base “DC” is zero, so that gives a maximum modifier of -18.

The “critical success” / signature dish result occurs on Snake Eyes (1,1,1) if the character has a success. Snake Eyes are not an automatic success in this system, but they are usually good enough.

The “critical failure” result happens on box cars (6, 6, 6). If the character is expert enough, and the modifier isn’t too great, the dish might still be salvageable.

Adjusting For Traveller

Traveller, from memory, uses 2d6. Characters have to roll ranks+stat or less to succeed. Stats range from 1 to 6. Difficulty provides a negative modifier to the target.

Base Difficulty = 0; Use -2 for each +5 DC. Maximum modifier is -12.

“Snake Eyes” is a pair of ones, “box cars” a pair of sixes. 25 ranks is a hell of a lot in this system. FOUR ranks is a lot. Multiply Skill+Ranks by 2.5 (round up) to get the equivalent score for the purposes of edibility, reliability, and expertises. However, skills tend to be a lot broader in Traveller, so it takes TWO expertise points to add something to the character’s ability.

EG: 4 ranks, Skill 4 = 8; 8 x 2.5 = 16+4=20; character has 7 edibility, 6 reliability, and 12 / 2 = 6 expertise points.

Having a cookbook or equivalent would offer some sort of a bonus, helping to offset the penalty.

Adjusting for Mike’s Superhero System

Modifiers range from +150 to -150, with +75 being the standard modifier for an “easy task”. So base “DC” of 75, worst-case is 225 worse than this.

Modifier = 75 – [(DC-10) x 225 / 40] = 75 – 5.625 (DC – 10).

Skill rolls are derived from stats and other skills and can then be improved. They start at -100 (minimum) and range up to +150. The minimum needed to use as a professional career is -12 (that’s just how the math worked out). Hobbyists and amateurs can have lower scores than this, but generally -20 is the (reasonable) floor and many characters have skills in the 30s or 40s.

(Skill + 100) x 2 / 25 = # ‘bricks’. So 35 would 270/25 = 54/5 = 11 (always round in the character’s favor).

Rolls are on a d%. Roll must be less than or equal to Skill + Modifiers. 01 is a critical success, 00 is a critical failure. But for signature dish / edibility points, I think dividing the margin of success + 50 by 5; any result better than 19 is a signature dish, any result worse than a 1 is a penalty.