Trifle

Trifle is an English dessert dish made with fruit, a thin layer of sponge fingers, or sponge cake, soaked in sherry or another fortified wine, and custard. It can be topped with whipped cream. The fruit and sponge layers are suspended in fruit-flavoured jelly and these ingredients are usually arranged to produce three or four layers.

History

The earliest use of the name trifle was for a thick cream flavoured with sugar, ginger and rosewater, the recipe for which was published in England, 1585, in the book The good huswife's Jewell by Thomas Dawson. Sixty years later eggs were added and the custard was poured over alcohol soaked bread.

Research indicates it evolved from a similar dessert known as a fool or foole, and originally the two names were used interchangeably.

While some people consider the inclusion of jelly to be a recent variation, the earliest known recipe to include jelly is from later editions of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery. In her recipe she instructed using hartshorn or bones of calves feet as the base ingredient for the jelly. The poet Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote of trifles containing jelly in 1861.

Trifle (trimaran)

Trifle was a 42 ft (13 m)trimaransailboat designed by Derek Kelsall and produced in 1966 as a further development of his first trimaran Toria. Featuring a full roach main and small jib, the vessel took part in the 1967 Crystal Trophy race in the English Channel. At the time, it was considered one of the fastest ocean-going multihulls in the world.

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