In 1962, Helen Corey (born 1923), the daughter of immigrants from Damascus who settled in Ohio and Indiana, published The Art of Syrian Cookery. Her cookbook sold so well that it reportedly spent almost thirty years on the bestseller list of Doubleday, one of the most popular and prolific U.S. publishers of the mid-twentieth century. The Art of Syrian Cookery had a mission: to convince middle-class and largely Christian American audiences that Syrian, and more broadly Arab and Middle Eastern people, were heirs to the Bible lands and that, as immigrants in the United States, they were loyal, believing, and upstanding members of society. Helen Corey conveyed her message about the familial, civic, and religious virtue of Arab-Americans in several ways. She discussed her own Antiochan Orthodox Christian traditions at length; quoted extensively from the Bible, often juxtaposing verses to particular recipes; included letters of endorsement from ecclesiastical authorities, along with photographs of her priests, parents, and siblings; and lavished attention on Orthodox Christian food practices, especially the fasting cuisine of Lent. Years later, in 1989, she issued another cookbook, called Helen Corey’s Food from Biblical Lands, which added stronger inter-faith and pan-Arab “ingredients”. She did so by recognizing Muslim and Jewish food cultures, and by including recipes from friends who either had either come from or lived in a wider range of Arabic-speaking countries, such as Libya and Morocco. Drawing on editions of The Art of Syrian Cookery and Food from Biblical Lands, on reviews and food blogs about these two cookbooks, and on newspaper articles about Corey’s career, I will argue that Helen Corey was a pioneer in culinary diplomacy. However, the imagined homeland that she promoted through her cookbooks was not Syria, but rather a pluralistic United States. Indeed, Helen Corey became an “intra-national” (as opposed to international) diplomat for Syrian, Arab, and broadly Middle Eastern people within the American landscape, using food to emphasize her own civic credentials while making a plea for Arab-American inclusion.