soup strainer

Noun

soup strainer (plural soup strainers)

1. A device or implement used as a strainer for soup.
   • In the drawers should be kept cooking knives and forks, larding and trussing needles, wooden spoons and forks; also jelly-bags, dish towels, linen soup-strainers, fish cloths, and a large piece of cheese-cloth that may be torn in convenient pieces as wanted; a roll of tape and a ball of linen twine...1884, Sarah Tyson Rorer, Mrs. Rorer's Philadelphia Cook Book: A Manual of Home Economies, page 544
   • Remove and pass through a fine mesh soup strainer into a separate handi/pan.2004, Jiggs Kalra, Pushpesh Pant, Classic Cooking Of Punjab, Allied Publishers, page 40
2. (humorous) A moustache, particularly a handlebar moustache, that droops.
   • Though tawny-skinned, he easily passed himself off as white, growing a thick soup-strainer of a mustache to complete the disguise of his pale gray eyes.1976, Matt Braun, Buck Colter, St. Martin's Press, page 26
   • Charley stroked his goatee and moustache. "I don't know. I got this here soup strainer and chin whiskers now, and I didn't in Tombstone. […] "2004, Ronald E. Yates, Finding Billy Battles, California Times Publishing, unnumbered page