meat safe meaning: definition, quotations

meat safe

noun

A ventilated cupboard used to keep meat away from flies and other pests.

[…] her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty, mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe) […]1854, Charles Dickens, Hard Times. For These Times, London: Bradbury & Evans, […], →OCLC, 2nd book (Reaping), page 227:
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 […]1895–1897, H[erbert] G[eorge] 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:

3 more examples

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.
Under the pepper tree the meat-safe hung, and swung, round and round, slowly, on a wire.1955, Patrick White, chapter 10, in The Tree of Man, New York: Viking, page 140:
She took [the leg of mutton] and put it in the meat safe outside.1981, G. B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York: Moyer Bell, Part 1, Chapter 10, p. 62:

“[…] 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.”1896, Arthur Conan Doyle, chapter 10, in Rodney Stone,, London: Smith, Elder, page 172:
[…] 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.1908, Sewell Ford, chapter 14, in Side-Stepping with Shorty, New York: Mitchell Kennerley, page 221: