Modern dialectology develops in compliance with anthropocentric linguistics and it is a polyparadigmatic scientific field in which one of the leading positions is currently occupied by the communicative direction. The peculiarities of the genre nature of the dialect text is one of the topical directions of communicative dialectology. The article presents the study of the speech-genre representation of the food tradition which existed in the past and currently exists in the villages of the Vytegorsky and Totemsky districts in Vologda Oblast. The article shows that the main forms of representation of the food tradition in dialect speech include such genres as a story-memoir, a genre of wining and dining, a culinary recipe. It is noted that there are no clear boundaries between the genres, while communicating we may include one genre into another, as well as move from one genre to another. The main form of keeping food tradition is the genre of culinary recipe. We analyzed the peculiarities of the dialect text of the culinary recipe on the basis of a sample of recipe contexts, which are the core of the local food tradition: recipes for bakery products, drinks and dairy products. We also identified and analyzed the communicative features of the dialect text of the recipe (the principle of figurativeness, the priority of procedural knowledge, the predominantly collective image of the recipe’s author). We established the factors influencing the completeness and representativeness of the culinary recipe, among them the most important ones are extralinguistic (transformation of everyday realities of the modern village) and individual factors (the age of the informant, the ability of the informant to be a good storyteller).