back burner

• back-burner, backburner

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back burner (plural back burners)

1. (countable) A section of a stove used to keep some pots warm while one focuses on others.

   Antonym: front burner

   • 2005, David Rosenwasser, Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically, Cengage Learning, →ISBN, page 38:

     In restaurants, the back burner is the place that chefs leave their sauces and soup stocks to simmer while they are engaged in other, more immediately pressing, and faster operations on the front burners.

   • 2008, Frances E. Ruffin, Kitchen Smarts, The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc, →ISBN, page 33:

     Also, avoid reaching across a lit burner in the front of the stove to stir a pot on a back burner. Turn the front burner off while you tend to food on a back burner.

2. (figurative, uncountable) A state of low urgency; a state of low current importance.

   We'll put next year's Christmas party on the back burner until we deal with the current financial crisis.

   • 2006, Guy Lawson, William Oldham, The Brotherhoods, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN:

     I kept cases on the back burner for years—just thinking about them, playing them out in my head, waiting for the time to work it, or a lucky break.

   • 2006, Denise Richardson, Give Me Back My Credit!, Infinity Publishing, →ISBN, page 179:

     I made myself push those issues to the back burner after completing another dispute form.

   • 2023 April 5, “Network News: West Midlands Metro extension receives £60 million bail-out”, in RAIL, number 980, page 9:

     Before this bail-out, it had been widely speculated that the project would have to go on the back burner.

• on the back burner