Born in 1903, Wadeeha Atiyeh made the journey as a young girl from Mount Lebanon to the United States. Reaching adulthood, she worked as singer and entertainer based in Chicago and then New York, and often represented herself with tropes of orientalizing exoticism. Public recognition came to Atiyeh most significantly through the publication of her cookbook Scheherazade Cooks! in 1960. Featuring on its cover a drawing of an ostensible Sheherezade, famous seductress from the Thousand and One Nights, Atiyeh’s cookbook was written for mainstream American readers. The book represented not only Atiyeh’s efforts to earn a living, but also her attempts at cross-cultural mediation on behalf of Arab diaspora communities in the United States. Atiyeh’s cookbook is unusual in that lively and fantastical stories of Scheherazade and King Shahriyar introduce each chapter. These tales depict Scheherezade and the King not only engaged in a dance of seduction, but also fully involved in running an ostensible palace kitchen. Atiyeh’s narrations deploy orientalizing tropes, such as lavish feasts and sensuous harems, which were already familiar and accessible to American readers owing to the proliferation of Arab-themed restaurants and films since the 1930s. But Atiyeh’s stories also describe how this fictional Scheherazade entices the King into assisting her with running the household. He chops vegetables, rolls stuffed vine leaves, learns about the cost of different cuts of meat, and accompanies her on a shopping expedition in the market. This Scheherazade appears skilled, knowledgeable, and sophisticated, a woman who is at least as concerned with the division of household labor between herself and the King as she is with seduction. Atiyeh herself was a successful business woman making her way in post-war American society. She was careful to retain in her book markers of exoticism that she knew her audiences would find accessible and enticing. At the same time she depicted Scheherazade’s relationship with the King in ways she surely expected would defy her American readers’ assumptions about Arab women. Drawing on press articles and archival sources, as well as contemporaneous Middle Eastern cookbooks, this analysis of Scheherazade Cooks! demonstrates Atiyeh’s agency and resourcefulness in the cross-cultural project of self-identifying as a modern, wage-earning, Arab woman for American audiences.