meat safe

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English

Meat safe at a logging camp, U.S., World War I
Meat safe in Lyme Park, U.K.

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Noun

meat safe (plural meat safes)

  1. A ventilated cupboard used to keep meat away from flies and other pests.[1]
    • 1854, Charles Dickens, “(please specify the chapter name)”, in Hard Times. For These Times, London: Bradbury & Evans, , →OCLC, book the second (Reaping), page 227:
      [] her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty, mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe) []
    • 1895–1897, H G Wells, “Book 2, Chapter 8”, in The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, published 1898, →OCLC, book II (The Earth under the Martians), page 277:
      It was now dusk, and after I had routed out some biscuits and a cheese in the bar—there was a meat-safe, but it contained nothing but maggots—I wandered on through the silent residential squares to Baker Street []
    • 1950, Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice (The Legacy), London: Heinemann, Secker and Warburg, 1983, Chapter 9, p. 201,
      Masses of cooked meat were stored in a wire-gauze meat safe with nearly as many flies inside it as there were outside.
    • 1955, Patrick White, chapter 10, in The Tree of Man, New York: Viking, page 140:
      Under the pepper tree the meat-safe hung, and swung, round and round, slowly, on a wire.
    • 1981, G. B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York: Moyer Bell, Part 1, Chapter 10, p. 62,
      She took and put it in the meat safe outside.
  2. (boxing, slang, obsolete) The stomach.[2]
    • 1896, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter 10, in Rodney Stone,, London: Smith, Elder, page 172:
      [] but Bob ’e jumps inside an’ ’e lets ’im ’ave it plumb square on the meat safe as ’ard as ever the Lord would let ’im put it in.”
    • 1908, Sewell Ford, chapter 14, in Side-Stepping with Shorty, New York: Mitchell Kennerley, page 221:
      [] with him carryin’ his guard high, and leavin’ the way to his meat safe open half the time, it was all I could do to hold myself back.

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References

  1. ^ A. F. M. Willich, The Domestic Encyclopædia, First American edition, Philadelphia: Birch and Small, 1803, Volume 3, p. 58, under the entry FLY-BLOWN: “The easiest method of preventing such damage, is that of suspending the joints in a meat-safe, or a wooden frame surrounded by close wires, so that the flies may be completely excluded, and the air still allowed to perflate the whole apparatus.”
  2. ^ Eric Partridge (1951) A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English , 4th edition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, page 515