There ’s no ignominy in using a box mixture forbrownies , but a tray of fudgy squares made from scratch will belike earn you extrabrownie pointsat the bake sale , so to speak . The wordscratchitself sort of fits the meaning ofmade from dough , as though you ’re manually clawing together ingredients with your bare hands . But the phrase did n’t actually grow in thekitchen .
As far back as the late 18th one C , scratchreferred to the starting line in sport like running andcricket , where that line of reasoning might literally have been scratched into the flat coat . It was also the name of the line in aboxingring where participants face off before a round commenced . That definition ofscratchsoonpropagateda wafture of related to phrases — toe the scar , convey to the starting line , andcome up to ( the ) scratch — which fundamentally meant “ meet the standard . ” These Clarence Day , we useup to snuffin a standardised way .
Though the phrasestart from scratcharose from sport , too , it did n’t just mean you were start at the beginning with everyone else . As Merriam - Websterexplains , it signify you were compete without a head start or some other advantage given to less skilled athlete for take down the playing arena . This definition ofscratchstill exists today , in sportsman likegolfandbowling . By the early twentieth century , people were usingscratchand its phrasal derivatives figuratively , to describe anyone doing anything without a ramification up .
“ My client is an baby , a pitiful alien immigrant who start scratch as a stowaway and is now trying to sour an honest penny,”James JoycewroteinUlysses , publishedin its entirety in 1922 .
Exactly whenfrom scratchwas first applied to solid food remain unclear . But the early written mention that Grammarphobiaunearthedcame from a 1946 clause inThe New York Timesclaiming that “ the old - fashioned expressive style of preparation — from boodle , as it were , without frosty or canned products — is on the wane . ” WhenTV dinnerstook off in the former 1950s , the source of that article probably read “ I told you so ” to at least a few people .
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