In the segregated Mississippi Delta, social, economic, and political relations were often reduced to Black and white. But Mississippi’s Delta communities were also the home of small, but often influential, communities of migrants to the United States and prominent among them were Middle Easterners. As these Arab Americans negotiated the complex racial politics of the American South, food served as a means by which ethnic identities were preserved, whiteness was asserted, and Arab Americans’ place in the American South was negotiated. “Cabbage Tamales: Arab Recipes and America’s Segregated South” uses community cookbooks and oral histories to map the boundaries of identity for Arab Americans in the 20th century. The gradual inclusion of recipes for Arab America cuisine in Mississippi community cookbooks (evident as early as the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s) provided concrete evidence of white acceptance. Although some scholars have suggested that the retention of traditional foodways was an impediment to Arab assimilation in the Mississippi Delta (and Arab Americans, although viewed as white, continued to face discrimination through the 1970s), food was more often a means of bridging cultural divides than maintaining them. Mississippians were eager to experience new foods, including international cuisines, and Arab American women’s willingness to share their culinary expertise opened doors. Mary Tahir may have translated the name of her malfouf recipe to help her neighbors make sense of rolled cabbage, but her recipe for “cabbage tamales” in the Tchula Garden Club’s cookbook in 1958 demonstrated her acceptance amongst the upper-middle-class elite of a wealthy cotton-raising community. While economic advancement helped to lower barriers, Arab American women deftly navigated racial and ethnic differences and, often, did so with food. Following the publication of the Lebanese Cook Book by the Women of St. George Eastern Orthodox Church in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1977 (followed by the publication of a number of other Arab American cookbooks in the 1980s), Mississippians of Middle East descent declared that they were not only full members of their communities, but also that they would not be invisible in a region of the United Sates that often paid little heed to those who were neither Black nor white.