The Queen of Sauce
| The Queen of Sauce | |
|---|---|
| Type | Mechanic |
The Queen of Sauce is the cooking programme on the farmhouse television, and it is the main way a farmer learns to cook. A new dish airs every Sunday, starting in the second week of the first Spring, and simply watching the episode writes the recipe into the kitchen for good. Wednesdays bring a repeat of something already shown, which is the safety net for anyone who slept through a Sunday. The show runs new material for two years and then loops, so the full set of dishes takes two in-game years to collect from the television alone. Many of the best buff foods in the game appear nowhere else, which makes a Sunday morning in front of the set one of the cheapest investments a farm can make.
Overview
The format never changes. The Queen introduces herself, announces the week's dish from her secret cookbook, and talks through it with a good deal of theatre. If the recipe is new, it is learned on the spot. Nothing has to be bought, no ingredients are needed to watch, and the kitchen does not even have to exist yet, which means a farmer still living in the single-room farmhouse can bank recipes for later.
Sundays carry the new dishes in a fixed order, and the order is loosely seasonal. Spring opens with Stir Fry, Coleslaw, Radish Salad and the Omelet. Summer brings Baked Fish, Pancakes, the Maki Roll and Bread. Fall covers the Tortilla, Trout Soup, Glazed Yams and Artichoke Dip. Winter closes the first year with Plum Pudding, Chocolate Cake, Pumpkin Pie and Cranberry Candy. The second year is the better half: Pizza, Hashbrowns, Complete Breakfast and Lucky Lunch in Spring, Carp Surprise, Maple Bar, Pink Cake and Roasted Hazelnuts in Summer, Fruit Salad, Blackberry Cobbler, Crab Cakes and Fiddlehead Risotto in Fall, and Poppyseed Muffin, Lobster Bisque, Bruschetta and Shrimp Cocktail in Winter.
Wednesday reruns are smarter than they look. The repeat is chosen from the dishes already aired, and it favours recipes nobody in the house has learned yet, so a missed Sunday usually comes back round within a few weeks rather than waiting a full two years. In a shared save the check runs across all the farmers, which means a dish one player already knows is less likely to be the one repeated.
Most of the list cannot be learned anywhere else at all. A handful also turn up over the counter at the Stardrop Saloon, which is the quick route to the Omelet, Pancakes, Bread, the Tortilla, Pizza and Hashbrowns for anyone who would rather pay than wait. Lobster Bisque arrives in the post from Willy once he is a close friend. Everything else on the list is the programme's own.
The reason to care is what those dishes do. Lucky Lunch carries the strongest ordinary luck buff and is the standard preparation for a deep Skull Cavern run. Complete Breakfast and Hashbrowns both raise Farming, which is worth eating before a big harvest because crop quality is rolled as each plant is picked. Shrimp Cocktail and Lobster Bisque raise Fishing, and the bisque is one of the strongest healing foods in the game. Pumpkin Pie, Chocolate Cake and Pink Cake are loved gifts that cost little more than farm produce and milk. The Maki Roll is wanted for the Chef's Bundle at the Community Center, and Fiddlehead Risotto is the only sensible use for the ferns that fill the Secret Woods in Summer. Carp Surprise is the joke of the run and exists to absorb the Carp that clutter every tackle box.
For anyone who does not want to wait two years, the Queen Of Sauce Cookbook does the whole job at once. The Bookseller stocks it at a steep price, and only once a save has gathered a hundred Golden Walnuts on Ginger Island, so it is a late-game luxury rather than a shortcut. Reading it teaches every recipe the channel would ever have taught, including the episodes that have not aired yet, and reading it again does nothing further.
Notes
Green Rain overrides every television channel for the day, so a Sunday or Wednesday that falls on a Green Rain day loses its episode. The recipe it would have taught comes back through the rerun pool rather than being lost outright, but it is worth remembering when a specific dish is being waited on.
The cooking rotation is one of the few things in the game that genuinely rewards an early start to the day. The programme is available from the moment the farmer wakes, the episode takes a minute, and the recipe is permanent, so the habit of flicking the set on every Sunday and Wednesday morning costs almost nothing and ends with a full kitchen by the start of the third year.
The Queen writes several of her episodes as though she lives in the same world as the farm. One instalment answers a letter from Haley in Pelican Town asking for the Pink Cake recipe, another remembers the few days in Fall when the valley fills with blackberries, and the Pumpkin Pie episode treats the dish as a tradition of the Feast Of The Winter Star.
All Mechanics
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
