[2] The earliest use of the name trifle was in a recipe for a thick cream flavoured with sugar, ginger and rosewater, in Thomas Dawson's 1585 book of English cookery The Good Huswifes Jewell.

[4] Early trifles were, according to food historian Annie Gray, 'more like fools (puréed fruit mixed with sweetened cream)'.

One was in the 4th edition of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1751) and the other was by an unknown author entitled The Whole Duty of a Woman (1751).

[7] The Dean's Cream from Cambridge, England was made about the same time as Hannah Glasse's version and was composed of sponge cakes, spread with jam, macaroons and ratafias soaked in sherry, and covered with syllabub.

[4][8] The English cookery writer Jane Grigson has a trifle in her book on English Food (first published in 1974) and she describes her version, which includes macaroons, Frontignan wine, brandy, eggs, raspberry jam and everlasting syllabub, as "a pudding worth eating, not the mean travesty made with yellow, packaged sponge cakes, poor sherry and powdered custard".

[17] Tiramisù is prepared similarly to trifle, but it does not include fruits and the original recipe calls for the savoiardi (ladyfingers) to be dipped in coffee rather than spirits.