When people say, “Think outside the box,” the box I picture is Bisquick.

That’s a popular baking mix, of course, and it’s also what General Mills used to call the biscuits you could make with it.1 I can’t remember the last time I ate a “Bisquick,” but my father made them for us on weekend mornings when I was a kid, and they were a fine conveyor of sausage patties and apple butter. My parents still keep a box of Bisquick in their kitchen; I see it when I swivel by it in the lazy Susan cabinet on the hunt for actual flour.2

Because I. Would. Never.

I make biscuits from scratch.

That sounds boastful. Just writing it triggers a tumble of apologies, like a series of sneezes. (It’s fine to use Bisquick! Baking might not be your thing! I don’t judge!)

But as a dedicated home cook and a lifelong foodie, I have a strong bias against premade, shelf-stable, factory food.

I’m not sure when this started. Some of my earliest cooking memories were decidedly unscratch: rolling little balls of dough made from Bisquick, sausage, and cheese, for instance, or sprinkling Lipton Onion Soup mix on discs of Pillsbury biscuit dough.

It wasn’t scratch, but still it was cooking. And it was in the service of dinner parties, which my parents threw often, with grace, generosity, and an abundance of gin. Other than those appetizer hacks and TV dinners on babysitter nights, the childhood foods I remember were homemade. My mom did most of the cooking, and deputized my sisters and me to snap the tips off beans, crack eggs for spaghetti carbonara, and grate cheese for quiche. The first thing I remember making by myself was Toll House cookies, using the recipe on the back of the Nestle chocolate chip package.

Baking has got to be one of the easiest ways to earn praise. It fed — still feeds — my twin needs to please people and to show off. And of course, whatever you get praise for as a child, you keep doing. Or perhaps I shouldn’t universalize. Whatever I got praise for as a child, I kept doing.3 And then I just . . . got interested. Anything I ate I wondered how to make. Anything I made I wondered how to make better. At the same time, I was feeding my family and my friends. What tops a hobby in which even your failures and your obsessions serve other people?

When Bisquick debuted in the early 1930s, its ads claimed that “Science’s Most Thrilling Food Invention” allowed wives4 to make biscuits “109% faster” and in 44 fewer steps. Even if I wanted to quibble with that extremely scientific calculation;5 I’d have to grant that using a mix saves time and effort.

Most important, though, especially for “inexperienced brides,” it saves thought. As those early ads asserted, “the ‘knack’ or ‘trick’ of perfect biscuits is made into Bisquick.” You don’t have to understand how to make biscuits, much less perfect them; you don’t have to know how to cut shortening into flour (“something few women ever learn to do”), much less why.

But that part of baking — the part that uses my brain — that’s the fun part. That’s what connects me to the real, physical world as I try to figure out how I can act on certain materials (like flour and shortening) and certain forces (like pressure, time, and heat) to end up with the biscuit I picture in my head. If I’m not doing the thinking, I’m just doing a chore.

This combination of the thinking I am doing and the thing I am making, this meeting of inside my brain and outside in the world, it’s thrilling. It feels like being alive. It feels like being human.

I don’t believe cooking from scratch makes me a better person. Sometimes it makes me a worse person. While I’m rethinking the balance of baking powder and baking soda or trying to decide whether to bake or boil my rice, I have not been listening to a word my husband was saying. I have for sure left him to do all the cleaning and childcare before his own birthday party because I was busy rolling out pasta “for him.”

Nor do I believe cooking not from scratch makes a person worse. If using Bisquick allowed my father to skip those forbidding 44 steps to our hot biscuits (and pancakes and donuts), I’m all for it.

But cooking, actual cooking, makes me feel more like a human being. Because, like most people, I crave the spark of my brain engaged with the world.

Also like most people, I skip almost every opportunity to get that feeling. Yes, I bake the biscuits, but I do not grow the grain, mill the flour, or churn the butter. I do not sculpt the plate that breakfast sits on or build the counter under the plate or sew the napkin beside it. Basically, I take every single shortcut our mass-producing consumer economy offers except when it comes to making food.

And when it comes to making meaning.

My scratch obsession really intensified when I had kids. I’m sure I was driven by some of the assumptions about being a good wife and mother that were baked into the 1930s Bisquick ads, combined with the 21^st century’s censorious attitude toward the processed food that was now ubiquitous. We were constantly sold both Lunchables and the notion that good moms fed their children homemade food. I was smart enough to know that such scoldings were sexist and classist. But I did it anyway — I made my own baby food and graham crackers and applesauce — because I already loved to cook and I was home most of the time.

And because I was bored. God, little kids can be boring.

And — and! — because raising kids makes you intensely aware of everything you’re doing. Every choice you make, every word you say. Suddenly you have not just an audience but — how do I say this? — potential victims. Everything you do directly affects people you love most, people who depend on you entirely. People who are learning to be people by watching you.

It’s terrifying, sobering, electrifying.

So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this was the point in my life not only when I figured out how to turn cooked oatmeal into a toddler finger food but also when I started to say out loud that God was made up. Sometime I’ll tell you the whole story of how raising my kids made me an atheist. (Or you can buy my book!)

But for Scratch purposes, here’s the gist: Just as I was determined to give my kids food that I cooked myself, I was determined to teach my children things I believed myself — not hand down to them premade beliefs (in my case, Jewish ones) that bypassed my own brain.

When I had kids, I didn’t intend to raise them as atheists; I just planned to tell them what I actually thought, feed them homemade food, and make sure they wrote thank-you notes. In my book I write that series like a joke, like here are these three random things. But I see now they’re not random. They were three ways I felt I needed to push back against cultural norms: handed-down religion; factory food; preprinted, rote, or nonexistent expressions of gratitude.

So I bake my own bread. I celebrate a homemade holiday called International Pizza Day. I swat away the suggestions Google or Apple makes for replying to emails or texts. Since I truly love sausage cheese balls,6 I would not rule out buying that yellow box. I would, however, rule out using the expression “think outside the box”: Clichés are the Bisquick of writing, for those who haven’t learned how to cut their own metaphors into a sentence.

I am not doctrinaire. I participate in Jewish rituals when they come my way, and I think Science’s actual Most Thrilling Food Invention is Cool Ranch Doritos. And I’m not a rebel. Despite my efforts to think for myself, my own life has mostly followed the scripts I’ve been given, as a middle-class, college-educated, White, Jewish, heterosexual, cisgender, GenX American woman.

But I refuse to let the forces of capitalism and convention and the lure of convenience suck out the parts of my life that make me feel most human — and then tell me it’s both inevitable and for my own good. It’s neither.

Scratch is the line I draw — the line that a lot of people draw.

Scratch — this column — is about why, where, and how to draw it.

Share