I wont spoil any info i have on ingredients or my super secret recipe but only common stuffs.

The 10 Easy steps to max:

1. Cut wood or gather pickable items (Not those who need the action gathering since you don't get money from them!)
2. Once you have 10s go and buy the cook book and read it!

If you have a horse with bags jump to number 6
3. Go to a water source and press the action button Gathering
4. Take the water (In stack) and put them in the slots in Cooking (Use the cooking action to get the window up)
5. Press Cook and you will see that you get skill directly and are stunned for X seconds (Depends on how much wat! er you used).
6. Get a mount (or, run, but it takes longer since you most likely only can carry 1 stack of water).
7. Fill the Mount with 5 Stacks of water (50000 Units) and some on yourself but not too much, you don't wanna suffer from movement decrease.
8. Select a tool you wanna skill up (Some tools don't work with this but for example: you can just kill a rabbit, weasel or a pig and use that on the first slot and then the water on the others).
9. 5 Stacks of water skilled up an entire Tool skill from 0 to 100 in 1 click.
10. Do this on all the cooking skills/tools and now you have maxed it.

Note: Since we use this i am quite sure that the devs will remove skill gain from water soon....
If they do just replace it with carcass from an animal that yields a lot (example: Pigs).