Community cookbooks are a quintessentially American form of food writing whose roots go back to the late nineteenth century. Associated with places of worship or civic clubs, pooling recipes from many members, and generally produced by amateurs in small-town locales, community cookbooks have typically functioned as fundraisers. They open windows into bona fide home cooking (as opposed to the aspirational fine dining of commercial cookbooks), blending everyday dishes with holiday fare. Building on work from the field of American Studies, where scholars have begun studying community cookbooks more closely as a popular genre, this paper considers how community cookbooks have served as “rhetorical artifacts” of Middle-Eastern American communities. Middle Eastern-American community cookbooks have defined communities by connecting food to memories of migration and sometimes displacement, and by modeling what I call “culinary nostalgia”, entailing attempts to remain “faithful” to Middle Eastern cultural traditions amid assimilation and intermarriage. We can read recipes in these cookbooks, I argue further, not merely as instructions on how to make, say, kibbeh or stuffed grape leaves, but as mnemonic devices and cultural touchstones that affirm multi-generational identities that link American families and communities with Middle Eastern peoples and places. I draw on several Middle Eastern-American community cookbooks, beginning with a volume published in 1998 by congregants of the St. Elijah Antiochan Orthodox Church of Oklahoma City and reportedly based on an earlier edition from 1963. I then turn to a Melkite cookbook from Danbury, Connecticut published in 2012, and a Maronite cookbook from San Antonio, Texas published in 2014, followed by two cookbooks from 2018. One, which comes from an Armenian women’s league in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, mixes recipes inherited from long-deceased relatives – including survivors of the Armenian massacres – with others collected during recent pilgrimage and church tours to Armenia. The other, published by a Muslim community center in the United Kingdom, retains some classic features of the community cookbook, for example, by pooling recipes and aiming to raise funds, while departing from the genre in other ways –notably, by coming from outside the United States, albeit with an American sponsor. These two most recent volumes show how community cookbooks continue to evolve and thrive as a popular form of food writing and civic engagement, while affirming multinational and diasporic Middle Eastern identities.