A MULTIMODAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF A VEGETARIAN BORSCHT WITH SMOKED PEARS BY IEVGEN KLOPOTENKO

Summary

Online recipes serve as practical guides for food preparation and are complex multimodal texts that use linguistic, visual, and structural resources to construct cultural identities, assert authority, and impact customer behaviour. The article aims to apply Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to the online recipe for vegetarian borscht with smoked pears published by renowned Ukrainian chef Yevhen Klopotenko on his culinary platform "klopotenko.com". Visual grammar by Kress and van Leeuwen (2021) and the model of visual social actors by van Leeuwen (2008) are implemented for the analysis of how linguistic and visual choices construct chef as an authoritative cultural agent, position borscht as a symbol of national identity and invite the reader into a diverse community that values traditional alongside reinvented Ukrainian cuisine.  The analysis uncovers persuasion strategies, such as argumentation and involvement, “secret ingredient”, directive discourse of instructions, modality and mitigation, ideological stances toward food practices and cultural heritage, and the specific author-reader relations of the online culinary recipe genre. The findings suggest that a digital recipe is a social text which is used to promote and revive Ukrainian gastronomic culture.