Sure, There's bound to be advertisers for the niche out there. However, why just hold yourself to adsense? Try stuff like Amazon affiliates as you could sell cook books and so on. I think it would be a bad idea developing your own sort of recipe guide aswell and trying to sell that. Start a newsletter, provide people with some quality free recipe's first though. You could be onto something there
i think the key point for the adsense is visitors. if you think that you can find many many visitors to your site, it will be a money machine
You can, but as said above you need a lot of visitors - recipe clicks aren't the highest paying in the world (but they're not the worst either). I found that ads in a recipe site needed to be pretty prominent (like 336*280 before the recipe starts) before they got clicked on - I guess otherwise people just read the recipe! But it doesn't look so great like that. There are some clickbank recipe products you might want to take a look at as well.
I have a small "recipe" section at my site. it doesnt get much traffic but the clicks pay pretty well (not great, but 'ok').. If you can get a lot of traffic you can earn well - especially if you diversify your earnings.. but if getting traffic was easy we'd all be rich, wouldn't we?