Thinking of food (as I am wont to do), I wondered about the history of cookbooks and culinary schools. I know there are surviving recipes from long before mass production of books made them something other than a luxury item, and so a few thoughts came to mind:
Compared to records of other things (inventories, epic poems, religious texts, etc), do we have many ancient records of recipes, or cookbooks?
Was having written recipes considered something only the very wealthy and powerful would have? I know this is a rather broad question and most contributors here are very narrowly focused, so I'm perfectly happy to hear the answers you may have as they relate to your area of expertise.
Example: Would a wealthy family of the Roman Republic even have written recipes, or would they just have a good cook? Would the cook/chef even have written recipes?
When did great cooks/chefs attain a level of professional prestige? When did it become not uncommon for a skilled chef to get "hired away" from where they grew up, moving from employer to employer?
What can you tell me about the first culinary school we know about? When did they become prevalent (or at least not an extreme rarity)?
How did the spice trade (especially during and after the Age of Exploration) affect recipes, cookbooks, and culinary schools?
What is the first cookbook we know of? When did they become prevalent (or at least not an extreme rarity)?
Even if you can only answer one question, I'll be grateful :) Feed my mind /r/AskHistorians!
The "first" cookbook/recipe recorded is pretty darn near impossible to find, but I can talk about some things that might be of use. To give you an example, there's a Sumerian tablet being held in the New York University's Bobst Library (the Fales unit, I think?) that is a pretty early example of food writing.
Cookbooks are a hallmark of literate civilizations, and as early as premodern agrarian societies, it was the royal/aristocratic classes that developed a cookbook literature, not only because they had the access to these ingredients and resources (especially literate education as well as ingredients), but they had the impetus to preserve class by developing a complex cooking culture.
China and Italy might be the exceptions, though, since in these cultures it was regional cuisines that were high cuisines (think to the differences between Bologna or Calabria and Sicilia, or Fuzhou and Xinjiang and Guangdong and Sichuan cuisines). In South Asia, Mexico, among others, traditions were typically regional until the age of empires, when a class-based and gastronomic (taste-based, rather than health and moral based) cuisine began to develop through cookbooks. Of course, the mass proliferation (and, fast-forward later to after WWII in 1950s middle class America in middlebrow publications) of cookbook literature was not possible without the development of the printing press in 1440.
With regards to spice trade and empire, medieval trade across continental Eurasia led to the proliferation of sugar among other spices from the Orient in the upper classes, which were subsequently reflected in written cookbooks. After the Age of Exploration, mercantile and industrial systems of trade and coerced labour led to the proliferation of New World spices that have since entered the foods and recipes elsewhere. The perfect example of this is the chili pepper, which comes from the Americas and brought soon after Columbus and post-Columbus European invasions, and we could now easily associate with cuisines as far-flung as India as they were brought over by the Portuguese Empire. Bringing this full-circle, the arrival of European empire into South Asia not only brought new crops, but developed into cookbook cultures that, despite its far-flung roots, have made chili peppers inextricable from what we think of as Indian food.
Some sources:
Arjun Appadurai, "How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India" (1988)
Paul Freedman, ed. Food: The History of Taste. (2007)
-------. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. (2008)
Jeffrey Pilcher, Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican Food. (2012)
Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant. (2000)
EDIT: formatting