I can't anwser for cuisine in the Antiquity, but I can give you some pointer in medieval cuisine, specifically for french cuisine in the XIVe century (wich is already "a long time ago").

 

We have two main sources for that : Le Viandier de Taillevent (roughly translated : "Taillevent's Meatbook"), redacted by Guillaume Tirel, chief cook for the french kings Charles V et Charles VI, and Le Ménagier de Paris (roughly translated : "The Parisian Household guide"), attributed to a Parisian bourgeois in the XIV century. I think both have been translated in english (from the translation in french, because they were written in old French, and pretty much un-readable by the average french speaker)

 

What kind of recipes can be found in those books ?

Le Viandier is the recipe book fit for a king's table, so keep in mind it's food that only nobles would eat regularly. There is a lot of meat, but mostly pork, poultry and venison, because ox and cows were used primarly for farming and milking, and raising one was long and expensive. Fish is also quite present, but keep in mind that it was more frequent on the shore than inland. The recipe make heavy use of various spices : pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, even saffron. Vinegar is also commonly used, often with honey, so many dishes would have a bitter-sweet flavor. Meat are roasted or prepared in a stew.

Most of the recipe from Le Viandier are quite rich and sophisticated, but also includ simpler, lighter dishes for fasting days. Vegetable are often cooked in soups, or in the stews. Broth (from meat and from vegetable) is often used to dilute stews and sauces

 

Le Ménagier is a household guide, so it gives both recipes and general advices on how to maintain and direct your household. The recipe are not as fancy as thoses in Le Viandier. There is a lot of recipe for poultry and egg, since it was the most common animal products. Eggs are boiled to various degrees, and accompanied with vegetable sauces (for instance, the "brouet vert d'oeuf et de fromage", poached eggs with a sauce made of parsley, spinach, broth, red wine, spices, served in a bowl with cheese, wich I heavily recommand, but I will come to that). There is also a lot of pies and dough, garnished with meat (often cheap cuts of meat). Soupes are also very common.

Fish is also presented in Le Ménagier, with a distinction between fresh-water and sea-water fishes, but the recipes are not very complex. Most of them consist of fried or boiled fish, with broth and/or wine. The notable exception are pies, that can be quite complex to make, and quite tasty (for instance, the Ménagier as a eel pie recipe that is delicious)

 

My main references on the subject is the french book Alimentations médiévales. ve-xvie siècles Paris, Ellipses; 2009), by Alban Gauthier, and a medieval cook book by Jeanne Bourin. I didn't read anything on the subject in english, so I can't recommand any specific books. But there is quite a lot on the subject, if no-one here can give you some pointer, I sure a bit of googling would give you a basic bibliography.

 

So here is a overview of the recipes. But it doesn't anwser your main inquiry... What did it all tasted like ? Well, there is one simple way to find out... Just try it. Both Le Viandier and Le Ménagier has been translated. However, the translation doesn't make for a very good cook book, because the quantities are often not clear. Some ingredients are obscur, and we are not sure what they are talking about.

But, many people have studied and tried to recreate those recipes. And there is many "Medieval Cook book" that lift heavily from both these sources. I own one of those, Jeanne Bourin's Cuisine Médiévale pour table d'aujourd'hui, wich, while not a hundred percent accurate, is the product of serious research on both the sources I mentionned. I'm sure there is some equivalent in english.

So, with my cook book (and a passion for cooking and food, because, as I'm sure you have guessed by now, I'm French), I tried some of those recipes. The result is... often underwhelming. Spices tends to be too overpowering for my taste. Recipes from the Viandier are heavy on the stomach, but not unpleasant. The bitter-sweetness of some of the stews are quite satisfying : I tried a veal stew, with vinegar, spices, limes, a bit of honey and chopped liver mixed with the broth, and it was stellar. Where medieval cooking shine, is in its sauces, soupes and pies. All of them make satiating meal out of cheap ingrediens, and offer flavors that are not often used in modern days cooking (especially, since there was no potatoes, they use various tubercules that are pretty much not used anymore, like paneys or chervil).

So overall, I would recommand you to find a cook book of médieval recipes, and try some recipes for yourself. Don't expecte something out of this world, but it's, if any thing, a fun thing to do, especially with friend and family.

 

One last thing, to end on little fun fact : Those cook books also contain "impossibles recipes", especially the Viandier : Swan roast, dolphin stew, salted whale... And some ridiculous serving ideas :

• a method to serve a full peacock, cooked, but not plucked, and to make it look like it's spitting fire by putting a metal rod covered in oakum in its beak

• A method to garnish the inside of a pie with live birds that will fly out as soon as you cut the top of the pie open.

• A recipe - And I'm not joking - to dress a cooked chicken in a custom made armor, with a veal skewer as a spear, riding a roasted piglet

 

So, that's all I have on the subject. I hope I anwser part of your question.

[edit : formatting, wording]

Considering a redditor made a very well writen answer for medieval cuisine, I'll try to make the same for antiquity. My answer will be centered around Roman cuisine in the proximity of the Gaul between the II th B.C. and the V th century A.D. (And while we're at it you guessed it I'm also french and most of my sources are in french but I believe you can find traduction of my principal primary sources)

I'll examine firstly which sources are available and make a general overview of the Roman cuisine then I'll go deeper into several group of food products (fruits, milk product, meat, fish, shell fish, fish sauce and Wine/alcohol).

So first the primary sources. We got a lot of roman texts directly or indirectly talking about food consumption or production. To name a few : Pliny the Elder in his "Naturalis Historia", Cato the Elder with "De Agri Cultura" or Virgil in "The Georgic". Cato is mainly manual for aristocrats on "How to run and understand a Villae (a rural aristocratic habitation with a farm) 101", Pliny make a general overview of the world and therefore include food subject and Virgil is a poet. But the ultimate source about roman cuisine is "De re coquinaria" by Marcus Gavius Apicius, it's the one and only roman cookery recipes that went through times right to us. Obviously it got heavily modified through time but thanks to it we can get a general overview of what is roman cuisine. But we got a problem Apicius and his successors did not think it was useful to indicate basic info such as the exact quantity of each ingredients or the precise cooking time. But some mad people has gone through the process of experimentating each recipes to find the exact quantity and times. Nedless to say that they gone through a LOT of intoxication and indigestion. They compiled part of their work into a book in french (of course) "A la table des anciens: guide de cuisine antique" (by Laure de Chantal). I cannot also stress enough to immense input of archaeology in this domain : providing many field observation that allow us to draw a more concise view of food production and consumption at ancient time.

So let's begin with a general overview of the roman cuisine. Her main feature is the huge numbers of ingredients in a recipe (around 10) so we got a cuisine with many flavour, very scented. The most used ingredients are Pepper, Garum (I explain what it is below), olive oil, honey and a variety of celery called "livèche". You can note the absence of salt, it's remplaced by the garum : a salted fish sauce. Combined with the wine, thick and perfumed at that time (Roman mixed it with water, Celt doesn't). So we have a roman cuisine almost emetic for our modern taste. For example : preserve sow teat were very popular or the Patella which was a dish based on fresh cheese mixed with brains, codfish, chicken liver and numerous spices. Now let's go deeper into some foods products.

Fruits at antique times. Production were already based on huge orchard so fruits were pretty popular, they were also considerably smaller and with bigger pits. They also tasted diffrently for example peach were more close to apple than the modern one, or melons were considered as vegetable. In ancient time you can eat plum, sloe, damson, peach, cherry for example. Grape and Olive were absolutly predonderant and at the root of the Roman/Greek culture. Olive were consumed as a fruit and mostly as oil. Olive oil was not only for food, it was also cosmetic, used for light and so on. It was used in almost all aspect of life. So for olive oil and grape/wine it's not a surprise that it existed a wide range of quality and a vast commercial network. Around all the Mediterranean sea 10 to 17 variety of olive tree were cultivated and the most esteemed (according to Pliny) was from Picenum and costed more than perfume.

Milk itself were not commonly consumed, considered as babaric. And therefore mostly used in cosmetic. Nevertheless cheese were produced and was mainly a rural and familial dishes. Only fresh (no maturing) and flavoured with various spices it was a "working-class" dishes, consumed at breakfast. Despite everything we know that Augustus was fond of mozzarella. According to Pliny the best cheese came from the region of Nîmes in Gaul.

Roman consumed mainly 3 type of meats : beef, pig and sheep (completed with fowl). Hunting wasn't common (around 1% to 2% of total meat). And like olive oil there were a wide range of quality depending on your economic situation. The production was already specialised and organised both for the structure and for the species. One of the best ancient brisket came from the Allobroges territory (Savoy/Dauphiné). We have the pictures of decadent roman consumming exotic animals such as zebra or pink flamingo. This pictures is not true for most of the time and are an exception when it occurs.

Fish were problematic, it's an edible goods that stay fresh for very little time. So the consumption of fish and shellfish were inversely proportional with the distance of the sea. Yet it existed perservation techniques mostly involving salting. Most of the fish were from coastal fishing area so mackerel, anchovy, sardine were mostly consumed. For shellfish : oysters were the most eated. In fact roman eated so much oysters that they began to use theirs shells to make fondation for road or houses.

Fish sauces were produced and consumed in industrial quantity with specialised structure and network, Brittany and the mediterranean coast of the Gaul and Hispany (Cartagena notably) were reputed for their prodcuction of fish sauces. There 2 kind of fish sauces : The garum (fluid) and the halec (solid) there are both the product of the same production line. To make them you take fish part (from bones to head) you put them into a very salted water and you wait. Fish parts auto-digest themselves and don't rot because of the salt. You have now a very aromatic (understand smelly) mix with a liquid part and a solid part that you filter to obtain both garum and halec. Then you can add whatever you want to flavoured your garum or halec. I want to insist on the fact that fish sauces were the main ingredient of numerous recipes and was probably the most common and iconic feature of the roman cuisine. Nuoc-mâm from South-east Asia is very similar to what could be roman fish sauces.

Concerning alcohol, spirits were not a thing since distillation was invented during middle-age. So the percent proof were 16/18 max. Beer, mead were common but wine were THE alcoholic beverage and a is a whole subject in itself (just as olive oil). Fannette Laubenheimer wrote a synthesis of beverages in Gaul in his "Boire en Gaule".

In conclusion today I Believe we have a pretty good image of what could be the roman cuisine. A very flouvered cuisine with many ingredient thanks to the wide territory and commercial network of Roman Empire. But keep in mind that the picture we get is mostly concerning elites and therefore my affirmations need to be nuanced. Not every inhabitant of the empire had access to fine wine and fish sauces nor have the possibility to make complicated dishes with various ingredients. Keep also in mind that's very ancient times and most plants have since evolved or completely disapered so many recipes are impractical.

Hope that my broken English is mostly understandable and that I responded to your question, at least partially.

There is comparatively less documentation of cooking habits from the Byzantine period as there are for other parts of the ancient and medieval world--the Romans had Apicius and the Greeks Athenaeus to preserve a detailed account of their culinary habits, but the Byzantines never found an equivalent writer (or at least, if there was one, their work did not survive into modernity). As far as I know, no comprehensive study existed in English until 2010. Today, we have Andrew Dalby's Tastes of Byzantium which paints a fairly clear picture and consults a healthy variety of the sources that are available about daily life in the empire and its cuisine.

The picture of food in the ancient Greek and Roman world is a fairly clear one. /u/Kaayred covered the Roman world quite well, to touch briefly on the Greek we have a lot of textual evidence discussing culinary life from the period. The 5th century BCE poet Archestratus (called at various times "the Daedalus of tasty dishes," "the Hesiod of gluttons," etc) wrote a poem, now only extant in fragments, called the Hedypatheia, which more or less walked a reader through the cuisine of the eastern Mediterranean world. Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae is another critical work from around the 3rd century CE which recounts a series of banquets including detailed remarks on the cuisine and recipes. Deipnosophistae actually gives us the oldest known recipe with a named author, with the 5th century BCE chef and cookbook author Mithaecus' recipe for the preparation of tainia (red bandfish) preserved in the original Doric. Some of these have even lasted into the modern era. Moussaka is actually recounted in ancient Greek cooking, although probably not in the exact same form that it is today.

Byzantine food essentially grew out of the shared cultural influences of the Greco-Roman world. The heavily spiced cooking of Rome could be incorporated into the more traditional Greek diet, and near eastern influences were never entirely far either. It was not really comparable to modern Turkish cuisine--the daily food of Constantinople was very fish-heavy and would extensively employ both spices and honey. The 12th century satirical dialogue Timarion illustrates the importance of fish to the Constantinopolitan diet; when the protagonist, freshly arrived in Hades, meets his first shade, he is met with the following chain of questions: "How many mackerel do you get for an obol? Bonitos? Tunnies? Picarels? What’s the price of oil? Wheat and all the rest of it? And I forgot the most important thing: how’s the whitebait catch?"

Dalby produces recipes where he can, but the reality is that there just aren't many of them. The most ambitious is for a one-pot dish called monokythron which included "cabbage, five kinds of fish, fourteen eggs, three kinds of cheese, olive oil, pepper, garlic and sweet wine." This particular recipe was preserved in the work of 12th century poet Theodoros Prodromos, and this is how most recipes that he presents are preserved--in random other works such as traveler's accounts, medical texts, etc.

I suspect you will not find this answer as satisfying as the more comprehensive ones available for Rome and medieval France, but I hope it has been at least somewhat illuminating. If you're curious about Byzantium specifically, I do recommend Dalby's work. It's dense and one can learn a lot about not just cooking, but daily life through the variety of sources he pulls in to reconstruct Byzantine cuisine.