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BAKEMEAT!
noun
1. Obsolete. pastry; pie.
2. Obsolete. cooked food, especially a meat pie.
Quotes
Already the smell of the marriage bake-meats was in the air: they were like to eat them with a sauce of sorrow.
-- E. F. Benson, "The Dance on the Beefsteak," The Countess of Lowndes Square and Other Stories, 1920
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral bak'd-meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
-- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1623
Origin
The English noun bakemeat has been obsolete since the end of the 17th century. The first syllable of bakemeat comes from the English verb bake, a derivative of the uncommon Proto-Indo-European root bhē-, bhō- “to warm, roast,” from which English also derives bathe (and German bähen), and Greek phōgein “to roast.” Meat originally meant food in general, not flesh (a sense that arose in the 13th century), as in the meat of a nut or fruit or in the proverb “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” The Old English word was mete, closely akin to Old Frisian mete, Old Saxon meti, and Old Norse matr. Bakemeat entered English in the late 14th century in the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s (1340?–1400) Canterbury Tales (composed after 1387).
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