When people say "from scratch" what do they really mean?

Depending on what the recipe is, I might say that I made it “from scratch” even is some of the ingredients were packaged.
I would not consider a Betty Crocker cake with canned frosting to be “from scratch”.
If I made the cake with flour, sugar, vanilla, etc. and then put canned frosting on it I would say I made it from scratch.

When I say “from scratch” it usually means everything that goes into the dish is one ingredient. Sometimes you have to open a can of tomatoes or condensed milk to cook something, and I’d still consider that as being made from scratch.

Using a cake mix, box of rice-a-roni, or a frozen entree isn’t “from scratch.” Making something using mainly pre-made, processed foods isn’t really “from scratch” either.

For Easter I made a dessert “from scratch,” and I completely think of it that way even though I had to open a box of biscotti to grind up for the crust of the dessert.

Then there’s “kind of homemade,” like the way I make chicken pot pie. I buy the crust, use leftover chicken and homemade stock, and use frozen veggies. I guess if I took the time to make the crust myself, I’d still call it “from scratch.”

Mike Quinion explains:

Scratch has been known since the middle of the eighteenth century as a sporting term for a line scratched on the ground that acted as a boundary line or starting point. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary actually relates to cricket and indicated the crease, the line drawn in front of the stumps where the batsman stands. But the term is much better known from boxing, or rather from bare-knuckle fighting, in reference to the line drawn across the ring to which the boxers are brought to begin their bout. This gave rise to expressions like to be up to scratch, to meet the required standard in something.

Your phrase appeared a century later, by which time scratch had also came to mean the starting line for a race. Competitors who began from this line had the least favourable handicap and so were given no advantage. To start from scratch meant you had been allowed no odds in your favour. It has been generalised from that.

@robmandu
How’d you change the font in your answer?

@ text @

The handiest dictionary (Webster’s Collegiate, 11th ed.) defines “from scratch” as “from a point at which nothing has been done ahead of time” and gives the example of baking a caking from scratch, meaning without using prepared ingredients.

I don’t think this means you have to mill your own flour, though.

cooking something from fresh or dry ingredients. the dish is created from real ingredients instead of a box or carton.

translation: it’s better or tastier when you put the time in to make it.

Thanks pete

No problem.

old school typing

When I say “from scratch,” I usually mean made from the most basic ingredients I can easily obtain. So, if I make, say, biscuits from scratch, I may not grind the wheat or churn the butter, but I’m not making them from Bisquick :>)

@Jeruba @crisw Yes, I often wonder if milling the flour and churning the butter would be part of “from scratch”. I usually take it to mean using the actual ingredients, such as purchased fresh tomatoes, flour and butter, and such as opposed to pre-mixed or canned.

When I say from scratch, I mean from not out of a box. That’s how I was trained to cook. Mixes were expensive in the house I grew up in. If I wanted mashed potatoes, for example, I had to scrub the potatoes, peel them, boil them and mash them up with milk and butter. I know how to bake cakes and pies and biscuits and make pasta from the flour and eggs up. The most “scratch” I’ve ever done was to bake a cake right up from sifting the flour.

Sifting is painful.

@aprilsimnel That’s what I would call “from scratch”. As a child, on my Grandma’s farm, we had to get the food out of the garden, and pit the cherries, churn the butter (she milked the cow)but the flour was bought. We did have to grind corn when we wanted corn bread, but only because she wanted us to know how.

Now that’s scratch! My grandfather was raised a sharecropper so he learned to cook from scratch, taught his kids and one of them taught me a little. I had to learn the rest myself. We had no farmland in Milwaukee to churn butter, but I’m sure my grandfather did plenty of that sort of thing as a boy. Before he died, he had a hobby farm near his house. I saw him snap a chicken’s head off once when I was 5. He plucked and gutted it and prepped it and Grandmother made fried chicken with it. I haven’t had fried chicken that good since. :)

@aprilsimnel I watched my Dad kill many a chicken when I was a child also. The worst part was we had to pluck off the feathers in nearly boiling water, and they got in our ears and eyes, and all over everything. They did taste good. I think most store bought chickens today are very fatty and tasteless.

Near our property in WA there is a still-functioning grist mill. You can actually bring grain there and have it ground, plus they give you flours for a donation- whatever they are grinding that day. The cornmeal I got there was the best I have ever had! Once we move, I hope to be a frequent customer.

@crisw I haven’t thought of looking for my own mill. You are lucky.

I cook many family meals (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc) and i make everyting from scratch… in my kitchen that means making every little thing from basic prime materials.
No mixes, No canned food, nothing pre-made or pre-processed.
I even make my own salad dressing. And when you cook for over 30 people…. it takes a while… but it’s well worth it.

I don’t think of it as being nothing out of a can or jar. If something calls for olives I’ll be getting those out of a jar, but I’d still call the dish “from scratch”. If I use a can of tomato sauce as one of many ingredients when tomatoes aren’t really in season I might still think of that as “from scratch”, but when tomatoes are is season and I can use fresh ones to cook down and make the sauce first I usually will. I wouldn’t think of using a pre-made frosting as “from scratch”. I guess it depends on what people think of as the starting ingredients.

Well, cans, jars or freezer—but only if you put it there yourself, in the first place. If you start with ingredients from the farmer’s market, and only from there, you’re well on your way. Flour? Condensed milk? Maple Syrup? These are things that it is not reasonable to make at home. Tomato sauce? Canned tomatoes? Cheating if you bought them at a store. It’s close to scratch, and I’ve done it often, but I don’t consider it fully scratch, and in the case of tomato sauce, it’s not scratch at all, no matter what you put it in or on.

Normally, I think the difference was important, because scratch was generally of a much higher quality than premade foods. However, these days, with the availability of gourmet, boutique thises and thats, it can become increasingly difficult to tell what’s from scratch, and from the tastebuds point of view, I don’t know if it matters. From a sustainability point of view, it matters a lot. Buy local!

Well, we have to disagree about tomato sauce. :^>

I love the farmer’s markets all over this town. (I’m in Seattle.) Not only do you get the freshest ingredients, but you often have access to people who know the best ways to prepare unusual items, too. I’ve had some of the best meals from asking local produce vendors how this type of mushroom is different than that one or how best to prepare this or that.

I love going down to the market thinking, “Let’s find out what’s for dinner tonight.” :^>

@cyndyh I can’t imagine why on earth anyone would buy tomato sauce. To me it tastes like eating ‘can’ flavored mush. I can’t grow enough tomatoes to feed my family, but I do what I can, and buy the rest at the Farmer’s Market. I use my blender liberally.

You can get some organic stuff jarred, too, that’s pretty good these days. It depends a lot on how large a part of the recipe the sauce is for me. Not every tomato is the best sauce tomato. You don’t get the best sauce tomatoes year round. Oh, well. I guess I’m alone in the tomato sauce camp.

From the very beginning, with no precedent aspects.