Imagine a situation where you've been invited to dinner at a friend's place. You're extremely hungry but you learn that the dinner won't be ready for another half an hour. So you decide to eat an apple or a bite of bread or some other small thing which will not satisfy your hunger fully, but will temporarily make it more tolerable. Is there a word/phrase/idiom to describe this small snack prior to a big meal?
The Russian equivalent of what I am looking for is заморить червячка, which literally means to starve/kill the little worm. The only translation I found of this idiom was to stay one's hunger. However, I couldn't find any usage examples of it and the google query for define:to stay one's hunger doesn't return anything useful, so I guess this idiom, if used at all, isn't very common.
Best Answer
To stay one's hunger is perfectly acceptable, and not at all uncommon (though it's actually more likely to be "stay your appetite"). Less common, and with less of a "temporarily" sense, would be assuage one's hunger. But I think probably the most common idiomatic usage is...
...which my mother used to say to me when I was a child. Perhaps this one gains traction by alliteration / association with both stay and starve.