A: Not a chance! Fourings back in the day was as totally rad as fourings is today. An 1813 Cantabrigian fourings menu lists, “1 pint of strong beer, bread and cheese.”¹ Fancy that—fourings has not changed much in the intervening 200 years!

Going even further back to the 1300s, we find that during harvest time, field laborers were given the following whacked-out victuals for their fouringses: “brown bread and milk…, dannecks or froises (pancakes with lumps of bacon in them), Norfolk dumplings of dough and yeast, with occasional luxuries such as furmety, chitterlings, gofers (tea cakes), apple jacks (puffs), and swimmers (light pastry).”² Sometimes, their daily fourings provisions included “sundry little interjectional stimuli (a most happy phrase for pick-me-ups) in the shape of whets, baits, snaps, snacks, and snatches, relieved by lowans of beer.”³

__

1. Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk, by Naomi Riches p. 132 (1967)
2. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 162, p. 394 (1897)
3. ibid.

Further reading (because reading about fourings is as fun as reading erotic gardening narratives, which is to say that it is VERY fun): British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, by Colin Spencer, p. 58 (2003).