Helen Corey

Helen Corey’s Food From Biblical Lands was out of print until October 2016, when Echo Print Books and Media issued an updated version of the cookbook for the Middle Eastern Festival sponsored in Terre Haute, Indiana by St. George Social Center. Proceeds from the book sale benefited the associated St. George Orthodox Church.

Helen Corey published The Art of Syrian Cookery in 1962. Years later, she founded a press, called CharLyn Publishing, which then published her second major cookbook, Helen Corey’s Food From Biblical Lands in 1989, followed by Healthy Syrian and Lebanese Cooking in 2004. Corey produced a televised show inspired by Food From Biblical Lands in 1990 and a later documentary about Easter as observed in the Syrian Antiochian Orthodox Church Easter. She occasionally hosted television shows and often interviewed international guests. Her 2004 book Healthy Syrian and Lebanese Cooking received first place in the National Federation of Press Women, out of 1,700 books submitted.

Corey worked for many years in municipal and state government. From 1948 to 1961 she was secretary to the mayor of Terre Haute and Indiana's Young Democrat National Committeewoman. In November 1964, she was elected Reporter for the Supreme and Appellate Courts – and thereby the first Syrian American elected to public office in Indiana. At one time she also served on the Indiana Governor's Commission on the Status of Women.

Helen Corey (born October 9, 1923) is a Syrian-American cookbook author, television producer, and educator. She is also the first Syrian-American woman to have held elected office in Indiana. She is known for her cookbooks The Art of Syrian Cookery (1962) and Helen Corey's Food from Biblical Lands (1989), in which she stressed the biblical origins of Middle Eastern cuisine and the value of sharing food as a vehicle for cross-cultural and inter-faith dialogue. In her cookbooks she also promoted awareness of Eastern Christianity in the United States, by discussing her family's culture in the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

Helen Corey's parents, Maheeba (“Mabel”) and Mkhyal (“Michael”), were born in the Arne and Ein el-shara suburbs of Damascus, Syria, and migrated to the United States. Helen Corey was born on October 9, 1923, in Canton, Ohio, and lived there until she moved to Terre Haute, Indiana in 1946. She and her family were part of a wave of Arabic immigrants who migrated to Terre Haute during the early twentieth century and who settled there due to the city's “potential for prosperity through farming, mining and a growing manufacturing base.” As early as 1927, the town had a sufficiently substantial Syrian Christian community that its members wrote and notarized a constitution for its church, St. George Orthodox Church. In 2018, Corey participated in a ceremony commemorating a historical marker for “Little Syria on the Wabash”, the site of the original twentieth-century immigrant Syrian neighborhoods of Terre Haute.