Sources

Primary sources

Babylonian Tablets. (c. 1700 BC). Yale Babylonian Collection. — 35 recipes on 4 stone tablets; the oldest recorded recipes in the world.

Theophrastus. (c. 300 BC). Historia Plantarum [Enquiry into Plants]. — the oldest surviving botanical treatise in the Western tradition.
Anonymous. (1st c. CE). Periplus Maris Erythraei [Periplus of the Erythraean Sea]. — a Greeco-Roman periplus (merchant’s guide) to ancient Indian Ocean trade.
Pliny the Elder. (1st c. CE). Naturalis Historia [Natural History].
Dioscorides, Pedanius. (1st c. CE). De Materia Medica [On Medicinal Materials]. — influential Greek pharmacopeia.
Apicius. (4th c. CE). De Re Coquinaria. — famous Roman cookbook.

Liji 禮記 [The Book of Rites]. (n.d.). Warring States period, 475–221 BC
Fan Ye. (5th c.) Hou Hanshu 後漢書 [Book of the Later Han]
Ji Han. (c. 304). Nanfang Caomu Zhuang 南方草木狀 [Plants of the Southern Regions] — oldest extant botanical treatise on subtropical plants.
Li Shizhen. (1578). Bencao Gangmu 本草綱目 [Compendium of Materia Medica]. — the most comprehensive bencao (pharmacopeia) of pre-modern China.
Duan Chengsi. (9th c.) Youyang Zazu 酉陽雜俎 [Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang]. — a Tang dynasty miscellany of anecdotes, trivia, and fantastic legends.
Zhao Rukuo. (1225). Zhufanzhi 諸蕃志 [A Description of Barbarian Nations]. — a Song dynasty compendium of foreign peoples and their products; also as transcribed as Chau Ju-kua (趙汝适). English translation by Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill (1911) as Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, entitled Chu-fan-chi (St. Petersburg: Printing Office of the Imperial Academy of Sciences) link

Ibn Khurdādhbih. (c. 870) Kitāb al-Masālik w’al-Mamālik كتاب اﻟﻤﺴﺎﻟﻚ واﻟﻤﻤﺎﻟﻚ [Book of Roads and Kingdoms].
Ibn Sīnā. (1025). al-Qānūn fī l-Ṭibb القانون في الطب [The Canon of Medicine].
Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq (10th c.). Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh كتاب الطبيخ [The Book of Cookery]. — the earliest Arabic cookbook, cf.
Muḥammad bin Ḥasan al-Baghdadi. (1226). Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh كتاب الطبيخ [The Book of Cookery].