What does ‘from scratch’ really mean, anyway?

What does ‘from scratch’ really mean, anyway? It is all relative. We do not tell ourselves we are cheating when we buy packs of ready churned butter and bags of ready-ground sugar and flour, even though to cooks of earlier generation these would have seemed unimaginable luxuries. If a Victorian cooks wished to make a dish involving sugar, he or she would first have to chisel off a lump of hard sugar from a larger loaf and then grind this into a powder before finally pushing it through a series of sieves until it was fine enough to use

B. Wilson, The secret of cooking (2023), 13