hors-d'œuvre

Noun

hors d'oeuvre (plural hors d'oeuvre or hors d'oeuvres)

1. A small, light, and usually savory first course in a meal.
2. (broadly) Anything preliminary and of secondary concern.
   • His price was five hundred pounds in English or French gold—an interesting phase of your ordinary blackmailer's antipathy to paper—merely an hors d'oeuvre to the solid things to come, of course.1923, Ernest Bramah [pseudonym; Ernest Brammah Smith], “(please specify the page)”, in The Eyes of Max Carrados, London: Grant Richards, →OCLC
3. (dated, rare) Something unusual or extraordinary.