The theme was holes, so we put holes in the recipe book, that was our interpretation of the theme and the impetus behind the game. The description of the project states this, and we tried to make it fairly clear that that is the point of the game, is figuring out the missing ingredients based on comparing the known ingredient list to the name and the feedback of the customers. The names always consist of a descriptor about the food, followed by multiple flavors (a list of all the flavors who's strength for the recipe is above the average of the ingredients, followed by the two foods with the most sustenance totals in the meal, so meat and such end up being there when they're in the recipe as they have more sustenance than say a leek, We had a menu planned that would show the flavor profile of the ingredient you were looking at, so that the customer feedback of "too spicy" or "not sweet enough" would give insight into what the missing ingredients are.
We would have loved to have added a tutorial, and had plans on it, but near the end of the jam we were running out of time and had to rushy to even get the game playable so unfortunately it was never completed. This is why a good amount of information can be found on many submitted games' descriptions, because this isn't an uncommon thing to not be able to finish everything enough to have a great tutorial/introduction to the game.
The recipes are always randomly generated per playthrough (Each playthrough based on difficulty a certain number between 4 and 8 ingredients are chosen from a palette of 19 ingredients total, those ingredients are the ones you can find in the level. The recipes are then randomly generated from that subset of ingredients again based on difficulty, with easy having recipes of 3 ingredients, medium 5, hard 7 and hardcore 9, all randomly generated/procedural, and so are the names, coming up with code to take a list of ingredients and turn them into more complex and descriptive names would have likely taken longer than the jam on its own, so we went with a simple but descriptive way of naming things.