Omnivore: Adam Platt

Jarheads Making jam with the high-profile women who love its roiling, burbling, lucrative charms.

- 

IF YOU WANT TO VISIT Alyssa Mastromonaco's impressively industrious, immaculately organized kitchen during the early-summer jamming season-up in the town of Claverack, a few miles east of Hudson-there's a good chance you will be allotted a strict window of time in which to conduct your business. It's a bit like her years in the White House, when she was President Barack Obama's deputy chief of staff for operations, managing a rabble of visitors to her office in increments down to the minute.

"I'm definitely one of the type-A people," Mastromonaco says as we inspect the pots of cassis-flavored jam burping on the stove and a collection of California apricots that have been macerating with raw sugar and chunks of rhubarb since yesterday. In addition to her duties as founder (and sole employee) of the jam company Three Dancing Bears, which sells more than 30 kinds of preserves at various boutiques around the state, Mastromonaco co-hosts Hysteria, a weekly podcast on Crooked Media, and is a partner at Bedby8, a TV production company run by George Stephanopoulos and Ali Wentworth. Our discussion must conclude after precisely 45 minutes so she can attend a pitch meeting by Zoom.

"The further away I got from the White House years and having all these tasks to accomplish, the more anxious I became," she says, fussing with her concoctions in clogs and a berry-stained T-shirt. "The first time I canned, it was a peach jam. It was so stressful: I read all the science; I took notes; I made such a mess. But I felt such a relief at the end of the day. I could look at the table-I could see all my jars. I'd done something creative and also delicious. Last summer, I think I made 1,700 jars of jam."