Pastel Cooking and Drink Recipes Guide

guide

Cooking Basics From the Cookbooks

The Pastel mod’s food and drink system is taught through several in-game cookbooks, each written by a different chef from a distinct region. These books cover savory dishes, desserts, cocktails, and brewing techniques. To get started, find any of these volumes and read them carefully—they act as your recipe source and your instruction manual.

Imperial Dishes

Chef Aeverstrone of the Scarlet Moon Court writes about the imperial kitchen’s favorites. One signature ingredient is the glass peach, which grows on nephrite trees. These trees were originally brought from a distant eastern land, and the imperial family’s love for the fruit has spread the trees across every region they have ruled. The chef notes that pink is the color of royalty in his court, and the fruit’s blossoms are tied to that identity.

A difficult but rewarding dish from this book is lizard meat braised in wine and flower petals. Aeverstrone admits this recipe is easy to ruin—he says cooks may fail it two times or twenty times before getting it right. The process is long and uses many delicate ingredients, but the final result is a true delicacy. Expect to practice this one repeatedly before it comes out well.

Imbrifer Recipes

Chef Lorraine of Imbrifer trained under Aeverstrone and runs a full-lotus restaurant. Her teaching style is direct, and she uses certain dishes to test new students.

One such test is the Crawfish Cocktail. It looks simple, but the skill lies in flambéing peaches and spices to create a sweet, syrupy, and spicy sauce—all without cooking the crawfish itself. This requires very careful heat control and timing. Lorraine says it can take hundreds of attempts before a student succeeds on the first try.

Another classic from her school is Bagnun, a heavily spiced, luxurious soup. The dish is finished with a dollop of fresh cream, creating a visual and flavor contrast between the scarlet, peppery broth and the cool white cream. It is a standard lesson in culinary training.

Melochites Home Cooking

Aunt Melaya’s cookbooks offer a warmer, more personal tone. She writes for her “nephews” and shares traditional recipes from her home region in the deep.

Her first volume includes Banyash, a hearty crawfish dish that she calls the backbone of Melochites cuisine. It is sweet and savory, with notes of the woods, and is traditionally made with crawfish and sweet berries. However, surface access has made sweet berries harder to find recently. Miners in the region favor this meal because it is filling and invigorating.

The same volume covers young hare, a delicacy across many lands. Melaya strongly recommends using an artisanal azurte stout when cooking rabbit. This specific beer is made in only a few places in Melochites, but she insists it transforms the dish. A malt beer is the traditional fallback, but any high-quality craft brew will work well.

Desserts and Drinks From Melochites

Her second volume shifts to desserts and beverages. She praises the breweries and distilleries of her home caves, noting that their liquors have inspired many cocktails. One drink is described as leaving you feeling cozy inside.

She also speaks passionately about cacao and chocolate, which she considers the finest wonders of the surface. She claims this recipe will change the mind of anyone who doubts chocolate’s greatness. For her, it is proof that life is good and that the Shura still watch over the world.

Brewing Adapted for the Depths

The Brewer’s Handbook is written by an author called Reflection Of The Moon. Relations between the overworld and the deep are poor, so this book collects surface brewing recipes and adapts them to use ingredients found underground.

One recipe makes a creamy glass peach drink. The author notes that glass peaches are not only for emperors—anyone can enjoy them. If you have sweet berries, they make an excellent garnish, but do not substitute holly berries. The author warns they are no good. The book also mentions pyrite thickets as a favorite place in the depths, though they are dangerous to explore.

Covers the mod’s in-game guide topics: Imperial Cookbook Imbrifer Cookbook Melochites Cookbook Vol. 1 Melochites Cookbook Vol. 2 Brewers Handbook The Art of Brewing