The big problem is finding a balance between realism and enjoyment. Because if you wanna get technical, and this is just an overview provided by someone who you wouldn’t be able to understand without spellcheck half the damn time but…
“Cooking” could technically mean…
Cooking Fast Food, cooking italian, cooking mexican, cooking german, cooking hooman, skillet cooking, fryer cooking, pot cooking, etc etc… There’d be /some/ overlap but really you can’t go "LOOK I CAN MAKE A PB&J and /instantly/ know how to make Mac & Cheese out of the box. They’re both simple to do but at the same time you still have to worry about burning the cheese, etc…
Meanwhile, “Chemistry” could be…
Making Drugs, making acids, making gases, hell gasoline
Do you really want to break down all the skills into their own little category? A handful of recipes in CDDA are the kind you just know (Like how you /know/ if you put Peanut Butter and Jelly on bread, ta-da PB&J) but the rest of the recipes aren’t a matter of discovering them, but rather learning them from a book; following a recipe. Some things, Mac & Cheese for example has the recipe on the box and logically you’d be able to follow it right there and then. Others, mutigen for example you’d ideally need the book in your inventory to make it properly. (Or you can try to make it from memory with a failure chance that decreases the more you do it, or is eliminated with the “Memory Banks” Bionic)
overall “Skill” still comes into play here, instead of it being a number assigned to how many recipes you can you it’s more a thing of what you know. EG Knowing how to safely combine chemicals, how to operate the machinery needed, etc, etc.
Like I said, it’s a balance between fun and realism. Personally, I think the system is fine as is.
A little bit of expansion on my thoughts of needing Recipes to make stuff, the more experimental recipies (Mutigen for example) could be found in labs as notes EG:
Lab Notes - Mutigen
Lab Notes - Mini-Nuke
Lab Notes - CBM: Power Storage MKII
and so on. A handful of recipes can only be made after disassembling something:
Personal Notes - CBM: Power Storage
Personal Notes - CBM: Alloy Plating