Food and history will take centerstage during Flagler Museum lecture series

Food and history will take centerstage during a new lecture program at the Flagler Museum.

Food Talks will welcome visiting experts on Feb. 6 and Feb. 27 who will highlight how historical events shaped — and were shaped by — local and regional food traditions.

The program is part of the museum’s newest series: Together at the Table, which celebrates Florida culinary traditions. It began in November with an al fresco dinner at the museum showcasing Florida agriculture.

“Food is such an important part of our culture,” Lauren Perry, the Flagler Museum’s public affairs director, told the Daily News.

“Our shared love of and interest in food is as true now as it was in the time of Henry Flagler (during the Gilded Age),” she said, referring to the railroad magnate and Florida developer whose Palm Beach manse is the museum’s focal point.

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When the lecture series kicks off at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 6, Anna O. Hamilton will discuss Florida’s diverse culinary heritage and the relationship between the state’s agricultural past and Flagler’s railway system, which reached Palm Beach by 1894.

Hamilton, a former journalist from northeast Florida, is an oral historian and audio producer who’s currently a doctoral student in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The lecture on Feb. 27, also at 3:30 p.m., is “Southern Foodways: Creole Cooking.”

New Orleans author, professor and filmmaker Zella Palmer, who has given food and history talks across the country, will discuss how the development of Creole cooking and people responsible for it have influenced southern regional cuisine.

Palmer is the chair of the Dillard University Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture in New Orleans.

“No matter where you look, you can show how food has had such an important role in American history,” Palmer told the Daily News Thursday by phone.

Different cuisines tell a story, she said, “but even specific dishes can have a rich cultural history” shaped by pivotal events.

The upcoming lectures “are exciting because I think they connect to a broad audience,” said Perry. “They speak to local and Southern foodways and American cuisine as a whole.”

Food Talks is free for Flagler Museum Sustaining-level Members and higher; $10 for other members; and $28 for non-members. Tickets include general admission to the museum; advance reservations are required.

For more information, call the museum at 561-655-2833 or visit flaglermuseum.us.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Flagler Museum lectures will focus on connection between food and history