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It takes a bit, but John figures out what's missing.
Maybe it's that their lives have been so incredibly disrupted that it's hard to even think about falling back into old habits and routines, but it's a full three days before John realizes that since crossing over they've been living on gushers and cereal bars and apple juice and the occasional charred or rubbery steak or weirdly anthropomorphic citrus. What's more, he's pretty sure that none of the others have noticed either, and from what he's seen, the trolls are on a similar diet. If anything, the trolls seem to care more about it, but then it's been months since they started playing and John supposes that given a few weeks his friends would probably start to develop a few cravings, too.
He's not going to let it get that far, though, not now that he knows what they've been missing. He combs through his sylladex for food and cooking supplies and wheedles his way into looking over the list of captchalogue codes Rose has been keeping. He barely starts to ask for permission to see what Dave's got and is brushed off with a distracted "sure dude knock yourself out" as the other boy sits hunched over a tablet with Terezi, who giggles, and he feels just a little guilty as he pokes through Jade's things as she sleeps. She's doing that a lot again, and he's really not sure whether it's Vriska or if she's worn out or if she just never learned any other way of dealing with stress than to sleep through it.
He pays a visit to the punchcard alchemy lab, and then finds a bit of laboratory that makes a decent impromptu kitchen, with running water and some heating elements that make for a decent range. No oven, but what's he going to need an oven for, baking a cake? Like that's going to happen.
When he emerges again with a plate of hamburgers - well, meat that's not so much ground as mangled, on "buns" cut out of several layers of wonderbread, but it's real food and it's obvious what it's supposed to be - the looks on his friends' faces are priceless.
It surprises John that, even with the groundwork laid, the kitchen set up and more or less stocked, none of the others seem particularly inclined to do much cooking.
He'd never have thought to list "cooking" among his own interests - it's just one of those things you pick up, isn't it? Especially when it's just you and your dad, who works full time, in the house. Meal preparation at the Egbert home was a time to hang out, to talk, and even if Dad had gotten a little too intense about baking in the past year or so, John's got fond memories of sitting on the counter with a mixing bowl in his lap, jabbering on to his father about his day at school.
Maybe it's the one positive bit of legacy from Betty Crocker, but the Egberts have always connected through cooking. Maybe that's why that last, desperate flurry of pastry had disturbed John so much - he'd recognized, on some level, that Dad was making a huge effort to reach out to him before it was too late.
John tries not to think about that now, though. He doesn't really mind if no one else wants to take a turn cooking. Getting back into the habit of food preparation comes easily, and it's comforting.
John makes an art of cooking, and the others begin to notice.
It doesn't take long for him to realize that Rose is the only one who really understands the difference. Even if his friend is not much of a chef herself, John gets the impression that the Lalondes ate well - probably better than his own family. He encourages her to make requests, to give feedback on what he produces, and he's thrilled to receive one of her infrequent smiles when he figures out how to create a decent facsimile of her favorite foods in his spartan kitchen.
He tries not to get his hopes up that this is starting to push back the last vestiges of her grimdarkness. That's not the sort of thing one likes to be wrong about, and although the dark tendrils have receded, she still moves like a predatory animal and he keeps catching glimpses of entirely the wrong kind of light in her eyes.
Even if they don't have the same frame of reference as Rose to understand it, though, the others still seem to appreciate his work. Dave tries to hide it, but sometimes there's a flicker of genuine surprise at John's latest creation, especially as John becomes more confident and his food starts looking less like hastily cobbled together experiments. Sometimes Dave hangs around the kitchen while John works, and although John is glad of the company, his friend seems more impatient than anything. There are times when he wonders if Dave has ever eaten something that wasn't delivered or microwaved or straight out of the fridge.
He's also not sure he believes everything Dave tells him about the state of the Strider kitchen. There's irony, and then there's rendering one of the most important rooms in your home completely nonfunctional.
More often though, it's Jade who follows him around the kitchen, watching with wide green eyes. She'd endlessly fascinated, and if he wonders about Dave, John knows that Jade hasn't had a properly prepared meal in years, because she tells him as much. She was never in any danger of starving, but all the cooking she knows how to do is with her cookalizer, which looks like a hotplate but produces results a lot more in line with a microwave.
She's also the only person John has ever met who likes to eat raw pumpkin, and they both agree that it's absolutely stupid that the game won't let them replicate the gourds. He promises her that someday, when they are out of this mess, he is going to bake her a pumpkin pie, and she laughs.
Occasionally a troll wanders through, but they've long since worked out their own food supply and for the most part his work holds little interest for them. It doesn't help that they are primarily carnivorous, and although most of them enjoy fruits and vegetables in small quantities, Karkat gets fed up and forbids further experimentation before John can find a grain that the trolls can safely digest.
Vriska declares, just once, that she wants to try her hand at this whole cooking thing. John wonders at first, given what she produces, if there's something fundamentally different between human and troll senses of taste, but Karkat informs him that it's just that she makes really terrible grubloaf.
John never feels closer to his Dad than he does when he's cooking. He can't help feeling, as he works out just the right balance for a soup that's equally appetizing to both human and troll, that Dad would be proud of him.