Guide for Cooking
Cooking makes a lot of money at a low level, which is what is nice about it. Also, at R10, you get to make seafood pizzas, which are also quite nice.
Velvet Ribbons are an easily obtainable accessory that boosts your cooking rank by 1. If you want to rank your cooking skill more rapidly, it'd be a good idea to keep one of these around.
In order to be a cook, these books are a very good idea, especially in the beginning; the four livestock books and Simple Recipes. The livestock books can be found at Amsterdam (Sheep), Nantes (Cow), Porto (Pigs), and Calvi (Poultry). Simple recipes can be found at Bordeaux and Palma, or you can do a merchant guild quest with 0 reward in your capital city to get a free one. If you're learning cooking, get them. Simple Recipes makes flour out of wheat, the other four process livestock in various ways. Makeable Meats (found in Genoa) will be needed later on, also the Pie Making book from Dublin (you may need to invest to be able to buy this), and to get the ultimate reason to have cooking at R10, Eastern Mediterranean Cuisine, go to Famagusta and invest a mil. Seafood pizzas have +50 vigor, are easy to make, and are awesome. Plus, you can quickly sell them for 2kish in the company shop (I usually sell for 1700 personally)
As far as skills, you'll need Cooking, livestock trading absolutely, food and seasoning trading are also nice. The Animal Trader job is the job of choice for up-and-coming cooks.
Also, fishing goes hand in hand with cooking, so getting it and everything involved with it's a good idea. There's a +50 vigor item recipe at R6 that can be found in the North Sea Seafood (London). It requires salmon, which can fairly easily be obtained (with a sufficiently high fishing skill, I think R3 on that) in the inlets a few days north of Bergen.
R1 to R3 you'll want to turn wheat into flour. It won't make much money, but it'll get you past these ranks. Once R3, you can start processing animals. Where you do this is up to you, but a few good places to do it are Gijon (pigs and geese) and Den Helder (Sheep and Chickens). For English players, Edinburgh sells quite a few sheep. Sheep and pigs have R5 recipes, so sticking to them will get you to R7 fairly quick. However, at R7, start making roast lamb, this levels you fairly swiftly. at R8, the pie book from Dublin has a nice recipe if roast lamb's getting a bit tired. Once you're R10, head to Famagusta and get the pizza book.
Keep in mind that handicrafts has a fair amount of overlay with cooking recipes. Complete Seasonings comes in handy with many recipes.
Storage is another skill that the budding chef should consider as there are a lot of recipes (pet foods) included that use storage to process the base ingredients (fish with nuts a prime example). A useful book for storage/cooking is Traveller's Food Procuring Skill found in beriut with investment.