Dr. Michael Denner: You can tell a lot about a cuisine and culture by the way they eat their milk… That’s the point I tried to make in our latest Georgian Cooking Club meeting, waving about a gallon of milk, sheathed in its translucent plastic carapace. My students were confused at first… Georgian Milk Milk. […]

Dr. Michael Denner (notes from the American Test Kitchen): Georgians jokingly refer to tkemali (more accurately written t’q’emali) as “Georgian ketchup.” It gets poured on practically everything. I don’t know of another sauce like it: sour, fruity, salty, with a serious herbal punch and a bit of lingering heat. Maybe it looks like Mexican salsa […]

Dr. Michael Denner: For a lot of Georgians, satsivi is… the essence of Georgian home cooking. It is intensely nostalgic, served as the main dish for celebrating the new year, at home, with friends and family gathered around the banquet table, the supra. SRAS: Dr. Michael Denner is a professor at Stetson’s Program in Russian, East […]

During my first week in Georgia, my classmates and I took a trip out to Sighnaghi, which is roughly a two-hour drive from Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. In Sighnaghi, we visited the Monastery of Saint Nino at Bodbe, which was built in the 9th century and renovated extensively in the 17th century. Saint Nino, who […]

In Bishkek this past week, Chechen journalist Kamila Zhabrailova talked to SRAS students about the history and culture of Chechnya, the Chechen diaspora in Kyrgyzstan, and her attitude towards the Boston marathon bombings. The Tsarnaev brothers are of Chechen descent and had spent some of their childhood in Kyrgyzstan, meaning that this was an especially […]