Honestly, I just cook chunks of meat and boil water. I almost never bother with any of the other cooking recipes except to stockpile flour in case I don’t feel like blasting the wildlife. I don’t see much of a use for cooking as a whole past that point, except for mutagen and purifier, though I do support chemistry getting its own skill. You could move battery making to chemistry, and just about anything involving acid or tear gas, and probably complicated explosives and gunpowder too.
For higher level cooking to really be useful, the food that you can cook at 0 skill shouldn’t be so good. Chunks of meat have a literally infinite supply, you get multiple for every wild animal you butcher, and provide 40 nutrition, enough to require about 3-4 a day, or one wolf butchered at decent skill. Maybe adding quality in would shake things up a bit. Level 0 cooking chunk of meat creates “questionably cooked chunk of meat” that lowers morale has a chance to give food poisoning, while at lvl 10, you get “expertly minced deer tenderloin with fresh blueberries” that gives a long lasting boost to morale, and possibly a stat boost as well.
