4 Ingredient Recipes

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.

Sometimes creating a successful meal is not the result of complicated
cooking as much as it is knowing how to combine a few items for an
innovative result. For busy people, there’s a definite appeal to the
idea of being able to make an interesting dish from just four
ingredients. It has a cut-to-the-core simplicity, and a tone of
pared-down expectations that conveys a hint of confidence and
ingeniousness—anyone can combine four ingredients without blowing it.

At issue, of course, is what is an ingredient? In a recipe for
meatballs, one of the four ingredients is, yes, meatballs. The orange
cream cake recipe needs an orange cake mix. Biscuit recipes call for
biscuit mix, and the pancakes for pancake mix. As a how-to-cook book
it’s a joke, but shift your expectations and you’ll soon see merit
to the ideas. Don’t think of them as recipes but rather as procedures
for selecting and combining four convenient products or common
ingredients for an interesting outcome.

The 170 recipes include appetizers, soups, salads, entrées, side
dishes, and desserts. Colour photos, lay-flat binding, metric and
imperial measures, nutritional analysis, and an index all help to make
the collection of ideas practical and utilitarian.