More No-More-Than-4 Ingredients Recipes: The Kitchen Klutzes' Cookbook

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

The pleasure in this book comes from the generous sprinkling of notes on
the real-life stupidities people have committed in the kitchen. If
you’ve ever done something thoroughly outrageous, like baked a cake
with plaster of Paris instead of flour, this cookbook gives the
consolation of knowing you’re not alone.

The anecdotes and cartoon-style illustrations are delightful.
Unfortunately, the recipes are uninspiring even for a kitchen klutz.
Canned soup, packaged cake mix, and lots of bacon are found in far too
many of the recipes. Just reading them causes heartburn. The underlying
assumption is that the reader may be capable of opening a package, but
definitely cannot peel a vegetable or make anything “from scratch.”
Many of the vegetable recipes start with a frozen package of the
vegetable under discussion; cake recipes list “a cake” as one of the
four ingredients.

The concept of no more than four ingredients (plus salt, pepper, water,
and flour) does impose a uniform simplicity on the recipes. The book may
therefore have some appeal to beginning cooks or to people who must
produce meals but are determined not to learn anything about cooking in
the process.