Fruit jelly

Fruit jelly was a way to preserve fruit in the hot and humid parts of southeast Faerûn, particularly Luiren and Delzimmer. Fruit jellies were an export commodity and could be found in Amn, Calimshan, Tethyr, Sembia, and even Waterdeep circa the Year of Wild Magic, 1372 DR.

Description
Fruit jelly consisted of small pieces of fruit suspended in a translucent gelatin with a slight green tint. Invariably, there were also tiny air bubbles caught in the gelatin. It could be stored in most any container that could hold liquid, but the hin preferred ceramic jugs. The local market price for a jug was five copper pieces, but countries that imported this delicacy could expect to pay more.

The vernacular word for gelatin was "squirmhard". Squirmhard could be extracted from various animal fats, but the flavor of the beast lingered and not many people liked the flavor combined with sweet fruit. The preferred source of squirmhard was the glael, a ground slug that grew in abundance in southeast Faerûn. Glael were a sickly greenish brown and an ancient specimen could be as long as a human forearm, but a typical adult slug was about half that size. Raw glael had a glue-like taste so bad as to be practically inedible, but when harvested at the right stage of color, simmered to break down the structure, and strained to remove the fibrous guts, the result was a clear, bland squirmhard that took on the flavor of whatever was added to it.

Small fruit, such as grapes or dewblood berries, were boiled gently and then removed from the water and immediately added to squirmhard that was just beginning to cool. The mixture was stirred briefly to distribute the fruit and the flavor and then placed in a cool cellar to gel.

Around 1372 DR, the glael population in Luiren was severely limited due to over-harvesting, but the hills surrounding Delzimmer contained glael in abundance.