square meal

Example: “After a week of instant noodles, the students were desperate for a square meal.”

Origin: A widely repeated story holds that British Royal Navy sailors in the 1700s ate off square wooden trenchers — plates with a round hollow carved out for food — making a proper meal literally a square one. The trenchers were real, but no source, including the Oxford English Dictionary, connects them to this phrase, and the theory is now considered folk etymology. The more likely root is simply the older sense of "square" as honest, solid, and fair — in use since the 1500s — carried over to describe a meal that was equally solid and satisfying. The term is generally traced to 19th-century America, with an early association to the hearty meals fed to gold miners and laborers who needed the fuel for a full day's physical work.