The Hymn to Ninkasi, Sumerian Goddess of beer, contains a step by step that has been reconstructed. Tasters described it as rather flat, more like hard cider than what we're used to.

"Mesopotamian recipe collections, three cuneiform tablets at Yale University containing recipes in Akkadian. Probably originating from southern Mesopotamia in the seventeenth century BC, these are the oldest known food recipes anywhere in the world." ---Food in the Ancient World From A-Z, Andrew Dalby [Routledge:London] 2003 (p. 217)

They are all for meat in sauce, which indicates upper-class carnivorousness, though it might well be the meat of sacrificial animals.

Food Timeline even has some Mesopotamian recipes (modernized).

Until about 1800, all recipes are pretty much aimed at the professional cook, and only occasionally at the superintending housewife. A woman without a servant was going to be cooking simple foods like her momma taught her, bought nothing exotic, did not buy books, and was probably functionally illiterate. General literacy in the West is a late 19th C thing.

So cookbooks are mostly a list of ingredients, but many do tell you what to mince and what to grate, and in what order to combine things. There's a constant line a group of us built a drinking game around: "Do thereto with flour until it is enough." You were supposed to know how stiff the dough should be for this kind of item.

The earliest large collection of recipes that has survived in Europe is De re coquinaria, written in Latin, but containing Greek as well as Roman recipes. It's usually attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius. The oldest surviving text appears to have been compiled in the late 4th or early 5th C, the original in the 1st C.

The earliest surviving Arabic cookbooks are al-Warraq (early 10th C) and al-Baghdadi (13th C).

The earliest surviving in Chinese is Hu Sihui's "Yinshan Zhengyao" (Important Principles of Food and Drink), believed to be from 1330.