Three Element Cooking

If you have the chance to eat at Fire Spirit's house, don't turn your nose up at it. It turns out that cooking, like everything, is heavily influenced by their beliefs. But the food is great.

History

It is unclear where, exactly, Fire Spirit cooking traditions originated, but I think they may be connected with a culture from one of the lost planets. I have found a handful of brief references to a group of people for whom food was the center of their religion, and for whom different foods had significant meanings. Of course, the connection to this culture is tentative at best, and with only a few paragraphs about this other culture, the origin cannot be confirmed.
To understand Fire Spirit cooking, you must first understand that Fire Spirits believe all things are made up of some number of the three basic elements: heat, illumination, and breath. Furthermore, all cooking processes also contain an element, which is added to the food that is cooked. For example, cooking something on a fire adds heat, whereas chilling it adds breath. The goal of Fire Spirit cooking is to balance these three elements within a single meal, through cooking methods and ingredients. Thus, it is also referred to as Three Element Cooking.
At first glance, the elements represented by foods may seem random, but when you study the art, you can find patterns. Foods which grow on top of the ground, such as apples and berries, are usually considered to have a high level of illumination, whereas foods which grow in the ground, such as root vegetables, are said to primarily made of heat, and things which emerge from other places, such as eggs and mushrooms, have high breath content. Anything with blood is said to already be balanced, though according to Rajesh Horak in 1075, "blood is too pure and should not itself be consumed." Some Fire Spirits believe this means that one should consume no blood at all, and therefore meat should be thoroughly cooked, while others believe that it merely means blood should not be directly drunk, but bloody (raw) meat is acceptable. Food preparation is also intended to restore an imbalance of the three elements within a person. Therefore, if a person is low on an element, they should consume foods which are high in that element.

Components and tools

Many Fire Spirits believe that the only way to apply heat to a food item is to put it directly into fire (if something sits between the fire and the food item, the process adds breath or illumination instead). For this reason, these Fire Spirits have ovens in which things are cooked directly on coals or in ashes.