Is 4 Ingredients the simplest cookbook ever? We put it to the test

4 Ingredients

Every busy mum knows the sinking feeling of looking in the fridge and despairing about what to cook for dinner.

So when Rachael Bermingham and Kim McCosker found the answer – a cookbook where every recipe needs just four ingredients – they turned it into the best-selling book in Australia, even outselling Nigella Lawson.

The concept is simple. Each recipe uses a maximum of four ingredients – with no complicated weighing or measuring.

The result is more than 340 meals and desserts, with dishes such as Healthy Hot Dogs, Curried Eggs, Cheese Pies and Simplest Potato Bake Ever.

And the word is spreading. The book – aptly titled, 4 Ingredients – shot to number one in the UK Amazon charts.

Authors Kim and Rachael admit they’re not chefs. But with four boys between them under the age of six, they have had to learn how to throw meals together quickly.

The childhood friends, both in their late 30s and from Brisbane, had their eureka moment at a family barbecue. Kim says: “I told Rachael that I’d been collecting recipes which needed just four ingredients. She screamed, ‘I’d buy that book!’”

The pair then emailed friends and family to collect more recipes. The hard part, says Kim, was testing them all. “We’re not cooks, so it was torture. We had to cook 1,000 recipes to get it down to the final 340.”

The pair were convinced that there was a market but it was difficult to get the book printed.

“When we’d ring a publisher they would say, ‘Are you famous? Are you chefs?’ We’d say, ‘No’ and they’d hang up.

“We knew they were wrong. Mums need to be superwomen so this was what they needed.”

Determined Kim remortgaged her house to help find the £35,000 needed to self-publish.

And from an initial print run of 2,000 two years ago, the friends have now sold 1.4million.

Kim admits that she is embarrassed to confess how simple and cheap her dishes are. “It’s amazing to think we have outsold world-famous cooks.”

How easy is it? Writer Tanith Carey drafted in her daughters to find out...

Even if the 4 Ingredients recipe book sounded like a dream come true for a busy mum like me who hates cooking, I was sceptical about how good a cake this simple could be. It just seemed too ridiculously easy to be able to mush up a can of pineapple with some self-raising flour and sugar – and get a proper cake.

As there was no real weighing or measuring and only three lines of instructions, I drafted in my seven- and four-year-old daughters to help. I warned Lily and Clio not to be too upset if it didn’t work out.

So imagine their delight – and mine – when, after 40 minutes, a perfect golden brown cake emerged, better than any of the meticulously measured-out Victoria sponges we had attempted in the past.

When their friends arrived later, I felt like the world’s most perfect mum as I served home-made cake for tea.

Tanith Carey