fleshmeat

English

Alternative forms

• flesh-meat

Etymology

From Old English flǣsċmete, equivalent to flesh +‎ meat.

Noun

fleshmeat (countable and uncountable, plural fleshmeats)

1. (dated) The flesh of animals (excluding fish or invertebrates) used or prepared for food.

   Synonym: meat

   • a. 1529, John Skelton, Colyn Cloute, London: Richard Kele, c. 1545,^[1]

     some of you do eate / In lenton season fleshe mete

   • 1671, Margaret Cavendish, “The She-Anchoret”, in Natures Picture‎^[2], London, Book 2, p. 574:

     […] Fish may be mix’d with Flesh-meat, although all Physicians are against it: for certainly, the natural freshness and coldness of Fish, doth temper and allay the natural heat and saltness that is in Flesh-meat,

   • 1722, Daniel Defoe, “A Journal of the Plague Year”, in et al.‎^[3], London: E. Nutt, page 92:

     […] I had no Flesh-meat, and the Plague raged so violently among the Butchers, and Slaughter-Houses […] that it was not advisable, so much as to go over the Street to them.

   • 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell, chapter 6, in Mary Barton‎^[4], volume 1, London: Chapman and Hall, page 98:

     […] it seemed hard to be spunging on Jem, and taking a’ his flesh-meat money to buy bread for me and them as I ought to be keeping.

   • 1923, Arnold Bennett, chapter 6, in Riceyman Steps‎^[5], London: Cassell, page 115:

     “But how shall you cook it [the mutton]?”
     “Boil it, ’m. He never has flesh meat, not often that is, but when he does I boil it.”

Usage notes

Originally used to specify foods comprising animal flesh when the word meat was a general term for food of any kind; compare spoonmeat, sweetmeat.