If the player is the one who cooked it, the player learns a recipe after picking the food item from either the Crock Pot or the Portable Crock Pot. Learned recipes are stored in the player's online profile and are conserved between all servers. They can be viewed in the Compendium. The Cookbook is not needed to learn recipes, but it is needed to display the acquired knowledge.
Once the food is eaten, it shows the Health, Sanity, and Hunger the recipe heals, as well as bonus effects, such as Jellybeans' regeneration effect, or Spicy Chili's temperature increase.
The Cookbook recipes can be sorted in 5 categories: Alphabetic, Health, Sanity, Hunger and Side Effects. "Alphabetic" will show the recipes in alphabetic order. Choosing any stat will show the recipes you know that heal the most of the selected one first. Choosing "Side Effect" will show recipes with bonus effects first. You may also filter the recipes as: Meat, Veggie, Others, and Side Effect. Choosing any of the options will show only recipes with the criteria.
The following tables below shows the correspondence between the information in the cookbook and the actual values.