With a ‘Beat’ of Salt. The Evolution of Recipes as a Genre in the TikTok Era

Recipes provide a compelling illustration of how genres are conventionally understood and exemplify this concept in a clear and structured manner. In addition to serving as culinary instructions, they exhibit distinctive linguistic features and clearly defined communicative tasks, with a structure that has remained remarkably stable for several centuries. However, changes in the communicative landscape have brought about significant transformations, not only in the contexts in which cooking recipes are created and shared but also in their textual design and organization. The paper examines the evolution of recipes as a genre in relation to the media through which they are realized and disseminated. Specifically, it examines how the genre has been influenced by digital mediation, focusing on the video-sharing platform TikTok, an influential hub for entertainment content that was launched globally in 2018 and gained widespread popularity in 2020. The paper employs a multimodal analysis of a qualitatively selected dataset of TikTok cooking recipes to investigate how semiotic resources are distributed across the various affordances and constraints offered by the digital platform. Additionally, it examines whether the ‘semantic regime’ of the media environment - which articulates its communicative and ideational aims - shapes the overarching purpose of this procedural genre.