Scratch English muffin. Scratch strawberry and blackberry jam including scratch made pectin from backyard apples. Scratch made elderberry mead from backyard elder plants. 6 years old
Not scratch: the peanut butter.
I’d like to thank prednisone, ibuprofen and amoxicillin and past me for making this possible. Past me for making the mead, preserves and, from a few days ago, the dough.
The very first scratch meal I made was a PB&J sandwich. I paired it with a homemade porter.
What does “scratch” mean in this context?
From scratch is an idiom meaning “from the start” (as in a starting line scratched in the dirt for a footrace)
And in the context of food it means “cooked by myself from basic ingredients.” I don’t think OP means they grew the wheat, maybe not the jam berries, but they made the English muffin from dough using flour and yeast etc, not a mix and not store bought. They boiled up the jam from fresh fruit, and made the pectin to thicken it rather than buying pectin powder. They didn’t do all that tonight, in fact the elderberry mead started 6 years ago. And I bet it’s damn good!
I had, apparently incorrectly, assumed it came from scratching over a misspelling and rewriting it.
That’s a legitimate use of “scratch” and since OP was being too cool to use the whole phrase “from scratch,” it could be re-interpreted to mean “I decided to throw out the whole meal and just eat a spoonful of peanut butter. What a waste of all my hard work!”
Like if they’d just opened their mail and in it was a notice: WARNING: MAJOR ARSENIC CONTAMINATION IN YOUR AREA! Injesting anything grown in your soil may cause severe illness and harm to vital organs!
This reminds us to be careful with phrasing.
Appreciated the etymology of the phrase, thank you for the enlightenment! :)
I made the English muffin from flour, yeast, salt and water. The jam was made from strawberries, home grown blackberries and pectin made from my apple trees. The mess was fermented from honey and yeast and the elder flowers from my back yard.
The only thing that left unchanged from when I acquired it was the peanut butter. The rest was stuff I grew or bought and processed into something else.
From base ingredients, handmade, and often without a physical/digital recipe. (from memory)