For your reading pleasure (or at least to occupy some time you could be spending more profitably elsewhere), here is a word of the day episode made from scratch.
“Made from scratch” means “not made from a prepackaged mix.” But where does that meaning of “scratch” come from? It’s certainly not from the “scratch” that means a shallow wound, nor from the “scratch” that means responding to an itch.
“Scratch” appeared in English first as a verb, somewhere in the 1400s. The noun form was added within a century. Where it came from is a bit unclear; the best guess is that it’s derived from the German word “kratzen,” which means the same thing — and both words are probably based on the sound of scratching. But back then one thing was clear; “scratch” had nothing to do with cooking.
The use of “scratch” in cooking didn’t arise until about 1940; the first citation is from a newspaper from Chester, Pennsylvania, where there’s a mention of “…soups that may be made from scratch in your own kitchen.” It’s pretty obvious that “from scratch” was only used as a counterpoint to “from a can” or “from a mix,” and neither of those options existed until relatively recently.
But that still leaves open the question of where on earth did the expression come from? Prepackaged foods don’t seem to have anything to do with either scratches or the lack of scratches, and people have been cooking for many centuries without scratching.
“From scratch” might have come from sports. In the 1900s, a “scratch” meant a “line or mark drawn as an indication of boundary or starting point,” according to the OED. It was also used in boxing, where a “scratch” (line) was drawn at the place where the fighters would first meet. And the phrase “from scratch” appeared around that time as well, and meant “starting from a position of no advantage” or “beginning from nothing.” It was probably a bit of a stretch even so, but some culinary sports fan probably realized that the opposite of starting from a mix was starting “from nothing” — even though you did need to have all the ingredients available, so in a sense you were starting from even more than a can or mix.
As for this episode, I’m not actually sure whether it’s “from scratch” or not; what would “from scratch” even mean in terms of writing? After all, you always start with something, whether it’s original research, secondary sources, or ideas you’ve absorbed during the normal course of the day. Not to mention the language and the alphabet, which most of us didn’t invent. But on the other hand, it didn’t come out of a can.
