Meaning & Analysis
Different things are best at different ages: eat eggs very fresh, bread a day old, wine somewhat aged, fish long-cured or mature, marry a young woman, and prize an old friend.
Insights
Timely Fitness
Counsels that each good has its proper season or maturation curve; wisdom lies in matching use to ripeness rather than applying one rule to all.
Calibration of Desire
Urges disciplined appetite—seek immediacy in some pleasures (eggs), patience in others (wine, friendship)—so taste follows time’s logic, not impulse.
Hierarchy of Values
Ranks goods by the duration they require to reach their best: perishable necessities at one end, enduring loyalties at the other.
Experience Over Novelty
Asserts that certain qualities (trust, depth, flavor) thicken with age; what is newest is not always best.
Cautionary Mirror
By juxtaposing foods with human bonds, it warns that we often mis-time commitments—rushing what needs aging and delaying what should be fresh.
Culinary Pragmatics
The sequence reflects period kitchen wisdom: eggs are prized ultra-fresh; bread stales a little into better slicing; wine improves with moderate cellaring; ‘fish of ten’ likely lauds aged/cured fish (stockfish, pickled) or large, mature catches—an exaggeration that signals preservation culture more than literal years.
Temporal Ethics
Time is presented as an ingredient in both flavor and character. The proverb makes ‘when’ part of ‘what,’ converting chronology into a moral of prudence.
Old Friends
Ending on ‘a friend of a hundred’ crowns longevity of trust as the supreme vintage: social capital accrues slowly, outvaluing all gustatory refinements.
Gendered Historicity
The ‘woman of fifteen’ clause mirrors early modern marriage patterns and patriarchal valuation of youthful brides. Read today, it exposes past norms rather than prescribing them; the larger point is the (contested) belief that some human ties are judged by age as foods are.
Comparative Lore
Kin to sayings like ‘Yesterday’s bread, this day’s flesh, and wine of last year’ and ‘Old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust’: a trans-European habit of mapping optimal age onto daily life.
Rhetorical Devices
Enumeratio
A marching list (egg, bread, wine, fish, woman, friend) turns scattered advice into a single mnemonic schedule of ages.
Parallelism
Repetition of the pattern ‘X of [time]’ creates rhythmic balance, aiding recall and implying rule-like authority.
Hyperbole
Extremes like ‘friend of a hundred’ and ‘fish of ten’ exaggerate to fix the principle that endurance increases worth in some domains.
Antithesis (temporal)
Sets immediacy (an hour) against longevity (a hundred), dramatizing the spectrum from perishables to permanent bonds.
Synecdoche
Foods stand for whole practices—preserving, baking, cellaring—while ‘woman’ and ‘friend’ stand for social relations governed by time.
Transcription
Quotations
An egg of an houre, bread of a daie, kidd of a moneth, wine of sixe, flesh of a yeare, fish of ten, a woman of fifteene, and a friend of a hundreth, he must have that will be merrie.
An egg of an hours laying, bread of a daies, flesh of one years growth, fish of ten, a woman of fifteen, and a friend of a hundred years standing.
Cross References
- See Dür., II, no. 330.
- Y32 Yesterday's bread, and this day's flesh, wine of the year past bring health.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
Used under CC BY-NC 3.0.