meat and potatoes

1. 1.

   the fundamental part

   “successful negotiation is the meat and potatoes of arbitration”

   Broaderbasis

Questions about meat and potatoes

What does meat and potatoes mean?

meat and potatoes means "the fundamental part".

Is meat and potatoes a common word?

meat and potatoes is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.