The word "scratch"
is fraught with meaning.
In fact, it is one
of the fraughtest words I know.
You scratch a match
to light it. You scratch an itch to soothe it. If you're not up
to scratch, don't start a project. If you scratch a horse, you've
taken him out of a race. If you've got a lot of scratch, you're
loaded. If you're a chicken, you scratch for food. And you better
watch out for Old Scratch. In Stephen Vincent Benet's "The Devil
and Daniel Webster" he's the Devil. If you scratch out a word
you've deleted it. If you scratch your head it means you're puzzled.
Hardscrabble
farmers scratch out a living from rocky soil. Scratch the right
number and you win a prize. Scratch a Russian and you will find
a Tartar.
But the most important
meaning of scratch is that's what you use in cooking and baking.
You can make almost any dish in the world from it. Italian, Mexican,
Chinese, Indian, ordinary American. When I was a kid my mother
made almost everything we ate from it.
I remember the pineapple
upside-down cake she made from scratch. And the crab gumbo we
ate with newspaper under our bowls because the crab shells made
such a mess. And the spaghetti dish she made from scratch. She
boiled it, then put it in a long, oval dish with tomato sauce
(canned, not made from scratch) and grated trap (cheddar) cheese
and baked it in the oven. I was grown before I learned that's
not the way most people made spaghetti. "Made" is not the word
we used. We said "Fix." As in, "Mama, will you fix me a sandwich
for lunch?"
Dody fixed a lot of
dishes from scratch before she got cooked out after the boys moved
out on their own and left just me to feed. She baked pumpkin bread
from scratch and blackberry cobbler (the boys and I used to go
out and pick the blackberries in vacant lots) and cherry cheesecake
(the cherries were store-bought in cans) and pecan pie (well,
she still bakes those from scratch) and fig cream pie (the crust
wasn't made from scratch, exactly—it was from crushed-up
store-bought graham crackers) and the insides weren't baked but
made from peeled, sliced figs from the tree in our backyard. And
the chili, with chopped raw onions and grated cheese on top and
the crab and lobster curry with sambals (most of the *sambals
weren't made from scratch but were store-bought with scratch)
and the pork chops with candied yams.
Ah, yes, I remember
it well. But in the words of the country song, she "don't do like
that no more."
I guess she just ran
out of scratch.
*Defined as more than
condiments but not exactly side dishes, a combination of fresh
fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices.
