Celebrations big and small, international and domestic, have always been marked by special dishes, and at the moment restaurants and cafes throughout Glasgow and beyond are busy creating distinctive menus to welcome around a million visitors to the city for the Commonwealth Games.

Most of the menus rightly focus on showcasing top-quality Scottish produce in a range of modern dishes. No doubt that's because 1949 - the year the Commonwealth as we know it came into being - didn't offer anything particularly memorable in culinary terms.

One foodie venture however looks beyond all that to the host city's shipbuilding past, while attempting to revive one of the most fashionable foods of the era and the techniques involved in making it. It also makes a passing nod to the first Commonwealth Games in 1930. In the process, it confirms food's potential for giving a sense of time and place to significant moments in history.

Katy West's stunning Art Deco jelly mould is inspired by the zig-zag wallpaper design at Rogano, the city-centre restaurant whose interiors replicate those of the RMS Queen Mary, built at John Brown's shipyard in Clydebank and launched in 1934. The mould's five-point star axis cascades the zig-zags not only down the length of the interior, but also of the exterior to create a thing of beauty as well as function. West chose Highland Stoneware of Lochinver to produce it, explaining that since the pottery illustrates its products with Highland scenes, it lends them a sense of place, while Rogano represents for her a sense of travel and internationalism. Head chef Andy Cumming has created recipes for the mould, including a salmon mousse and a bramble jelly, both using carrageen instead of gelatin.

West's mould, entitled Common Wealth, is part of the Scotland Can Make It! project featured in last week's magazine, where Scotland-based designers and artists create souvenirs for Scotland - loosely inspired by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow - with the proviso that they have to be manufactured entirely in Scotland. It's run by the independent Glasgow-based design curators Panel with Creative Scotland.

West says she's looking at the move from an industrial manufacturing base to a service and tourism economy; she also believes the design has to stand on its own as an attractive and fully-functioning piece of tableware. She hopes that since the end result of her souvenir is defined by the user, giving scope for using the imagination, more of us will embrace jelly-making as a hobby. It's surprising we haven't done so before, given our current obsession with foods from the past.

Jellies have been the decorative centrepiece of dining tables throughout history, and no doubt many wobbly creations played a significant role in banquets aboard the Queen Mary, which was Cunard's flagship superliner from 1936 until 1949, travelling between Southampton, Cherbourg and New York. Jellies were significant features in medieval, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian times. During the Stuart reign of James VI, jellies took off at court because he loved fruit and sweet wines; recipes from the time added cream, white wine, orange and lemon juice, and hartshorn and ivory gelatin. Compare that to one wartime recipe from 1914 which used stewed prunes, cinnamon, claret and cream; and another from 1918 which used juice from fruit stewed with treacle, the whole lot thickened with cornflour. More recently the exquisite shapes, moulds and ingredients of jellies have been revived as a culinary artform by the design company Bompas & Parr, who use it mainly to explore the relationship between food and architecture.

I like the idea that historic culinary artefacts can be embraced and given a new appeal through contemporary design. And you can't get a more fruitful source material than jelly.

We're not talking the flavoured gelatine squares you can buy at the supermarket for less than £1. In the past jellies were artisan creations of natural gelatin, sugars, wines and spirits flavoured with fruit, cream, nuts and cereals; and carefully designed to have various degrees of transparency and opacity. There were jelly mosaics, marblings, spiralled columns, stripes; moulds went from flat scallop shapes to the highest possible. The shapes could be as bizarre as they were mundane and the moulds themselves were made of salt-glazed stoneware, copper, tin, aluminium and enamelled steel.

In olden days stoneware moulds were artisan affairs executed by hand by a master mould-maker. Katy West's stoneware mould is a modern departure - it was conceived on a computer and its pattern is replicated on the outside to make it more decorative and attractive to a new generation.

I reckon it's a thoughtful and fitting souvenir of this grand old post-industrial city, which many spectators and athletes will never have visited before. For Glaswegians, with their perenially sweet tooth, it will remind them of what they've been missing.

Visit scotlandcanmakeit.com.