The article is concerned with the issue of linguistic specificity of small-sized texts, describing their text structure (also referred to as composition) as well as linguistic properties and characteristics. A cooking recipe may be defined as a specific genre of this text category. In particular, the paper aims to describe semantic structure and linguistic features of the oral cooking recipes of the Russian Germans collected during a dialectal expedition in Krasnoyarsk region, Siberia. Culinary recipes of Russian Germans may be regarded as an evidence of the preservation of their linguo-culture, traditions and ethnic identity because they reflect a number of sociocultural parameters, societal and individual values. Sociocultural parameters make it possible to regard the text of the cooking recipe as a linguocultural phenomenon. The basis of the study is a field method: digital audio recordings of the recipe texts from German dialectal informants and a comprehensive analysis thereof as compared with the recipes found in the published books. For the graphic fixation of ‘dialectal’ recipes (that is in the transcripts) which combine features of the West German and East Middle German dialects the author used the spelling close to the norms of the standard German language. As a result of the study, certain distinctive textual and linguistic features of culinary recipes were established. As far as the text and semantic structure of the oral ‘dialectal’ recipe is concerned it is normal to omit the ingredients section, information about the duration of cooking. They don’t include any clarifications or parts equivalent to subtitles and footnotes of the standard written recipes. At the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and lexical levels culinary recipes possess typical colloquial and dialect features of the language of Russian Germans. The analysis of the recipes allowed to define the nature of changes in their linguistic components, to identify discrepancies between the recipes in the German standard language and those recorded in Krasnoyarsk region, Siberia at all linguistic levels. In addition, it became possible to discover in the dialectal material some cultural borrowings as well as to determine the linguistic impact of the other languages encountered by the informants during their life in Russia and earlier. The influence of the Russian language is exemplified among others in the mixing of elements of the Russian and German syntax and, in particular, violation of the typically German sentence framework.