The first recorded recipe for sweet dessert jelly appeared in an English cookbook in 1747.

While early jellies were mostly savory meat or fish dishes, the sweet dessert we know today took off in the eighteenth century. Cookery writer Hannah Glasse published the first known recipe using sweet jelly in her famous 1747 book, The Art of Cookery. She used it as a colorful layer in a classic English trifle. Chefs colored these early jellies naturally using violet juice for blue, spinach for green, and saffron for yellow.