Welcome to Scratch.

Why are you here? Are you hungry? Are you panicking about an upcoming dinner party? Do you nurture a secret penchant for ingredient pedantry and historical cookery?

If so, welcome home.

At Scratch, food is a negotiation between cravings and ingredient snobbery, laziness and from-scratch fanaticism, all wrapped in the need to use up an oversized collection of condiments and spices before the sell-by date.

Sometimes we’ll replicate a dish as it would have been made by specific people at a specific time in a specific place—culinary time travel. Sometimes we’ll talk about the history of an ingredient, or trace it back to the dirt or tree it came from. And sometimes we’ll just cook dinner. All food is fusion food; in their meanderings across the world, humans took whatever edible plants and animals were at hand and found ways to make them delicious, and here at Scratch, all ingredients get mixed together on the plate.

Our aim is not to tell you how something must be cooked, but to help you find new ways to cook by showing you how we do.