There's a collection of recipes attributed to a certain Apicius, who is known to us from a couple other sources as having been a famous lover of food and luxury during the 1st Century, AD. They don't seem to all have been by him, if any were in fact his recipes--it seems that by the 4th or 5th Centuries, when the work named for him was compiled in the form we have it today, his name had become a somewhat slangy way to refer to high-style, gourmet living. It's a quite lengthy work, taking up ten books that detail the preparation of the kitchen and selection of ingredients as well as the actual cooking. However, it has two major flaws. The first is that it's nearly impossible to reconstruct the dishes themselves. Although great care is taken in describing the ingredients used and the method of preparation and cooking, no mention is made of the actual amounts of ingredient used, which is indispensable for a modern cookbook and becomes quite important when we realize that many of the dishes were heavily spiced. Presumably a Roman cook would have known how to spice his food and in what amounts he would find it palatable, but a Roman's taste is not something we can accurately determine and all recipes constructed from this work are either guesses or adjusted to suit a modern palette. The other, and for a scholar far more important issue, is that the work is very much intended for wealthy readers, or at least their cooks, and much of it is about dishes to be served at lavish banquets. It a gives very little indication of an ordinary meal, and some of its recipes are downright absurd and rather garish, intended simply to impress by their extravagance (like the famous dish including flamingo). In addition to Apicius we have some additional recipes and a great deal of oblique or indirect references to the composition of various dishes that can help us build a decent knowledge of the recipe. Much of this comes from Pliny, and ironically is often in reference to Apicius and his weird dietary practices. For example, Pliny refers to a new method of cooking cabbage that Apicius came up with, and also refers to some strange practices of his--such as the fact that apparently to procure good pig liver Apicius fed his pigs only figs and slaughtered then by feeding them an excessive amount of mulsum, a sort of dessert wine that was sweetened with honey and spices. We have other references, such as the description of Trimalchio's banquet in the Satyricon, but only Apicius and, to some degree, Athenaeus, provide us with anything that could be called a recipe. Much of this is also in Roman work. Greek writings about food mainly date from the Second Sophistic in the 2nd Century, AD. , with Athenaeus and other writers, but they're not really recipes so much as catalogs of things that were popular several hundred years ago (the Greek writers of the period were almost obsessed with cataloging stuff that had been popular in the 5th and 4th Centuries). There's some stuff in Aristophanes and other writers from earlier (there are people who spend their entire lives studying references to food in Homer and determining whether these dishes represent stuff that was eaten in the Dark Age or the Bronze Age or whether they are complete fabrications of the poets fancy)