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Angel Delight

A nation long reconciled to spending just as many hours in the kitchen preparing pudding as the main course (it’s Thursday, so it must be jam roly-poly) was always going to need something immediately comprehensible to shake it out of its sweetmeat servitude. Bird’s Angel Delight was just the thing, and moreover offered an additional boon by using up those half-bottles of milk leftover from breakfast. It debuted in supermarkets in 1967 promising the taste of strawberries and cream from colourful pouches of microdust. The fact this luminous powder had to be vigorously whipped together with milk was the cue for dad to ‘take a turn’ with the mixing bowl, thereby proving that no-one could ever say he didn’t ‘do his bit around here’. While a panoply of flavours and spin-offs, including birthday-party favourite the milkshake and the sadly over-ambitious home-made ice lolly, ensured the brand lined your ‘afters’ cupboard through the 1970s, its ultra-functionalism lost favour in the fussy Ice Magic-ed 1980s.

4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. johnnyboy

    December 24, 2010 at 2:38 pm

    Angel Delight’s nemesis was surely Instant Whip (Cadbury’s). I always preferred the AD as Instant Whip had a glutenous texture to it that I really wasn’t keen on. Of course, both were always served in plastic Tupperware (TM) pudding bowls, which probably accounted for 99{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96} of the British population in the Seventies.

  2. Richard Davies

    December 24, 2010 at 5:29 pm

    My Mum always seem to get the Tangerine one, & was once miffed that she couldn’t find it at the shops. I joked that we had probably drained the world’s supply by having it so often.

  3. Applemask

    May 28, 2013 at 1:12 pm

    What is Angel Delight? No-one has ever managed to explain just what exactly the stuff is.

  4. Richard16378

    November 15, 2015 at 10:39 am

    A few weeks ago me & some friends had a world food evening, & a Portugese friends used some chocolate Angel Delight in a lieu of chocolate mousse in a pudding, as she couldn’t get the proper ingredients.

    It was very nice, the first time I’d had any for years.

    My Brother In Law is supposed to have lived of it & Super Noodles when he was a student.

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