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Horlicks is a malted milk powder that you mix with warm milk to
make a drink. It is wheatier, and less malty-tasting than other such drinks.
The basic ingredients Horlicks is malted barley, wheat flour and evaporated milk. It is
now available in many flavours including original, chocolate, banana, strawberry, light,
etc.
Horlicks is served in some Chinese restaurants as a snack, usually sweetened with sugar.
They serve it hot or cold -- to serve it cold, they make it first with the warm milk, then
add ice to chill it.
It is very popular in India, where special flavours and formulas have been developed for
the market there.
Despite their immigrating to America and inventing Horlicks there, it actually became
more popular back home in Britain. They had intended it to be an infant food, but it
became more popular among adults (though in India, it became popular for children.)
James Horlick and William Horlick were from Gloucestershire, England. James was a
chemist, working for a company that made dried baby food. He invented some food
formulas for the company, and got the hankering to set out on his own. William, his
younger brother, had previously emigrated to America in 1869. In 1873, James decided to
join him in Chicago. That same year, they started their own company (J&W Horlicks) to
make a malted milk drink for infants. They called their product "Diastoid."
By 1875, they needed to move to a place that was larger, so they moved to Racine,
Wisconsin. Their new factory was a small, one storey wood building, with seven
windows in each side.
Their slogan was that they made " Horlick's Infant & Invalids Food."
The first Horlicks bottles had the product information imprinted right on the glass.
Promotional mixing sets used to be sold consisting of a box that contained a jar of
Horlicks, a tall, relatively slender plastic mixing pitcher, and a whisk-like thing made of a
relatively flat disk with holes on it, attached to a long handle, that you used to stir and
churn the Horlicks in the mixing pitcher before you poured it into your mug. Called the
"Horlicks Easy Mixing Set", it sold in England for 3 shillings. The plastic pitchers said
on them, "HORLICKS MIXER: See mixing instructions on Horlicks Containers. The
graduations are for seven and fourteen ounces respectively -- one or two drinks. DO NOT
USE BOILING LIQUIDS"
[1] Horlicks was sold for £20 million in 1969 by the founders' sons to the Beecham
Group; the Beecham group merged in 1989 with SmithKline to become SmithKline
Beecham; on 27 December 2000, SmithKline Beecham merged with Glaxo Wellcome to
become GlaxoSmithKline.
Language Notes
"Bollocks" is a term in the UK which is roughly equivalent to the North American slang
word "bullshit."
The word "Horlicks" has entered popular vocabulary in the UK as a polite replacement
for the word "bollocks." No one is quite sure how it started, but in the 1990s, the
company decided to make it look like a parade and get in front of it with a TV
commercial in which a housewife says "Horlicks" instead of something like "bollocks."
In 2003, Jack Straw, the then British Foreign Secretary, used the phrase "a complete
Horlicks" to mean a "complete cock-up." But at the time he used it, the phrase was
already so well known that it was out of fashion.
The Horlick Mountains in Antarctica were named by Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd (25
October 1888 to 11 March 1957) in honour of William Horlick. William Horlick helped
to sponsor Byrd's 1933 to 1935 expedition to Antarctica, both with money and supplies of
Horlick's.