The First Trifle

In the fourth edition of The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy, published in 1751, Hannah Glasse published a recipe for a trifle that would change the nature of trifles forever. Hannah Glasse is famous for having copied most of the recipes in her books from other cooks and authors without disclosing it, so it is likely that in those 30 years after Mary Eales published her trifle recipe, someone created what we know as a trifle today; and that someone gave it the name ‘trifle’ when a dish like that would previously have been known as a ‘Norfolk fool’. Glasse must have picked up the recipe somewhere and decided to add it to the fourth edition of her book, as it doesn’t appear in her first editions.