There are some suburban housewives whom have wrought a successful career pimping 4 ingredient cookbooks; and although I'd say that I've had a fairly wide exposure to food over my lifetime, I could name but 4 dishes worth eating that contain just 4 ingredients. At least, dishes where I felt like I had cooked rather than combined.

This does not make a cookbook.

How many ingredients are too many? Is there some critical tipping point where adding an extra ingredient exponentially increases the chances of destroying the dish? Maybe there is a logarithmic scale where dishes reach their absolute limit; bending and breaking under the sheer weight and imbalance of their components. That limit is not near five.

Over time, I tend to be more attracted to complex recipes. Not necessarily complex flavours but recipes that are more difficult to cook. American food writer Jeffrey Steingarten once commented that he preferred cooking recipes that involved him going out of his way to buy a specific implement and took him hours to make. Rather than being a glutton for punishment, this is the endpoint of a lifetime of enjoying food; the time spent selecting and cooking food becomes part of the amusement. Cooking is something that I can’t really imagine doing as work because I enjoy it too much, to the detriment of speed and economy that is required to run a commercial kitchen.

So as I a small shot of antidote to the 4 ingredient canker, I delved into the SBS back catalogue to find the recipe with the most ingredients, one that preferably required its own special implement and an impossible to find, illegal component, like a live civet or non-pasteurised milk. I started with the curries. If I was to combine civets and milk, that would sound like the place to start. Civet blancmange sounds unlikely.

Most curries are knowingly complex but dead easy to cook. Anything that survives simmering at a low heat for long hours has a large margin for error, at least on the cooking side. It's the flavour side where the dish can go much more awry. The best I could do was the sindhi biryani, a rice and goat curry dish from Pakistan, which has about 30 ingredients. Half of the ingredients are herbs and spices, but sadly, nothing nefarious.

My original plan for cooking the sindhi biryani had me spinning a blog post entirely around the idiom about "getting my goat" but the origins of the phrase are unclear. It seems to have drifted into the English language in the early 1900s with an explosion in its use in 1915 after Jack London published the term in The Mutiny of the Elsinore. The French had been using a similar idiom (prendre la chèvre) since the 1600s. None of this etymology was even loosely food related.

Cooking a recipe on the basis of trying to find a pun within it is not the best idea. Not to mention that my local goaterer was fresh out of goat. Someone else had got my goat; I substituted lamb.

As for the cooking, it was straightforward; the proportions of spices right; and almost foolproof. It was as easy as combining seven 4 ingredient dishes together, at once.