The BACK of a herring, the poll of a tench, the side of a salmon, the belly of a wench are best

Insights

Gustatory eros

Culinary preference and sexual desire are twinned: savoring prime cuts becomes a figure for savoring bodies, fusing appetite for food with appetite for flesh.

Male gaze and partition

Value is assigned by carving a whole into parts; the saying normalizes a look that slices women (and fish) into ‘best bits,’ turning persons into consumable sections.

Local expertise

Knowing the ‘best cut’ signals insider craft—fishmonger or cook lore—extended cheekily to bedroom ‘knowledge,’ where worldly knowingness becomes social capital.

Middle as excellence

The belly/middle is singled out as ‘best’ (echoing kindred proverbs), elevating the life-bearing core as the site of warmth, fatness, and pleasure.

Comic transgression

A dining list veers into sexual innuendo; the abrupt shift courts laughter by flouting decorum, a safe-unsafe play common to tavern wit.

Cut-specific lore

‘Back of a herring’ (firmer flesh), ‘poll of a tench’ (head/jowl prized for broth or gelatinous richness), and ‘side of a salmon’ (prime fillet) reflect real gustatory hierarchies before the punchline swivels to a wench’s belly.

Variant tradition

Early records juggle the menu—sometimes ‘jowl of a salmon,’ sometimes ‘tail of a tench’—but the structure is stable: a knowing catalogue of cuts capped by a bawdy human analogue.

Humoral backdrop

Pre-modern dietetics linked fattier, warmer, ‘middle’ parts with nourishment and pleasure; aligning the woman’s belly with choice fish-cuts taps this medical-aesthetic sensibility.

Alehouse rhetoric

The proverb’s cadence and cheek suit convivial settings—banquet, market, tavern—where swaggering connoisseurship of food slides easily into ribaldry.

Gendered asymmetry

The jest presumes a male speaker and reduces ‘wench’ to a site of consumption, revealing the everydayness of objectifying talk in early modern popular culture.

Cross-proverb echo

It chimes with “Of women and fish the middle is best,” a broader habit of mapping culinary judgments onto erotic preferences to lend ‘natural’ authority to desire.

Rhetorical Devices

Enumeratio

A rhythmic list builds expertise and expectation—three culinary items—before the final, bawdy turn delivers the joke.

Parallellism

Repeated ‘the [part] of a [creature]’ frames each item alike, making the closing ‘belly of a wench’ feel grammatically inevitable and thus comically sharper.

Double entendre

Edible ‘parts’ double as erotic zones; gastronomic language carries sexual meaning without explicit naming.

Alliteration

b-sounds in “back,” “belly,” and “best” give the line a jaunty snap that fits tavern recitation.

Bathos

High connoisseurship in fish collapses into low bawdry, the sudden drop in register producing laughter.