I think having an article for each food is ideal. The way I figured it, each food article would contain all the food information, the recipe information about how to make it, and links to other foods which can be made with it (so if you had an item and wanted to use it, you could figure out what it was used for).
Sub-Categories for each cooking method is probably the best way to go. On each of the method's category pages we could put details about how to cook with that method, what items are needed, etc.
I think the food category should be disjoint from the recipe category however. One possible structure might look like this:
- Food
--- (list of all food items)
- Recipes
--- (list of all foods which have recipes)
--- Mixing
----- (list of all foods made from mixing)
--- Baking
(etc).
Such that every food article which can be cooked with a certain method goes into three categories: Category:Food, Category:Recipes and the category for the corresponding cooking method.
The argument for having a master Category:Recipes containing all of the recipe is arguably kind of weak. If a user wanted to know how to cook a certain food and didn't know the method, they could look up the food in Category:Food. The difference between Category:Recipes and Category:Food is that Category:Recipes contains only the foods which can be prepared through cooking, so if you wanted to browse only the cookable food articles, that category would serve as a convient index.
I think the trick is figuring out a way to organize foods by the stats they give, since each food can give at least 3 different stat bonuses (based on how well it was prepared) D:
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