Silda Wall Spitzer: Former NY First Lady Starts Columbia County Jam Company

It might come as a surprise to see someone with a career as expansive and notable as Silda Wall Spitzer’s—a life in law, finance, and the Governor’s Mansion—also in the kitchen making jar after jar of jam for family and friends. But Wall Spitzer, who was the First Lady of New York State during her ex-husband Eliot Spitzer's truncated gubernatorial tenure, has been preserving for decades—first in Columbia County, then in New York City, and later in Albany. Now she’s living in the Hudson area and making her jam for everyone.

Silda’s Jam is now on specialty market shelves throughout the region, made using natural ingredients, much of them local. Wall Spitzer’s even replaced the mountains of sugar usually needed to make preserves with New York State maple syrup. As the company has upscaled, it’s also started using local workers at regional copacking facilities to produce the still small-batch brand. Those partners include COARC, which employs workers with disabilities.

The jam’s origin story started with an unexpected seasonal bounty. “There was an overabundance of peaches in the orchard,” Wall Spitzer recalls of a summer in Columbia County when her parents were visiting her home in the 1990s. “My dad says, ‘You can’t let all these go to waste.’ And so I ask , ‘Well, what would I do with them?’ And he says, ‘You can make jam.’”

That first batch—about 70 jars—launched an unexpected passion. “That started the holiday tradition of giving jam to friends,” she says. The gifts were such a hit that she began making them every year, while balancing careers in law and finance, raising three children, and backing a busy political partner. Wall Spitzer still has a number of high-powered pots on the stove, serving as director and principal at NewWorld Capital Group, a private equity firm focused on the environment, and CEO of New York States of Mind LLC, which includes NewYorkMakers.com.

She’s also on the board of a number of foundations and organizations. “I tend to do things in threes,” she says, listing her positions with the Urban Green Council, the Center for Law, Brain and Behavior, and the Meredith College [where she received her undergraduate degree] board of trustees. “It’s all about community, and we want to do everything we can to sustain that community, support the local economic ecosystem, and really celebrate all that is special about the Hudson Valley.”

Wall Spitzer has had a home in the region for over 30 years. “It’s much more similar in Columbia and Dutchess County to where I’m from in North Carolina than in the city,” she says. “The Hudson Valley really sparks creativity.”

Silda’s Jam officially launched in 2019, making flavors including Cherry Pie, Gingerbread Peach, Blaspberry (blackberry and raspberry), Strawberry Rhubarb, and Blueberry Elderflower. Nine-point-two-ounce jars sell for $14.95 and include small wooden spoons. All varieties are vegan.

Local Sweetness

The use of maple syrup isn’t just a gimmick, Silda says—it’s an intentional shift in sweetness and texture. “It brings a different flavor profile,” she says. “It makes it less super sweet up front. There’s a little bit of smokiness to it, and I think that kind of comes out in the aftertaste. It’s a nice kind of bouquet on the back end.”

Making jam with maple syrup required serious trial and error. “I had to really experiment,” Wall Spitzer admits. “There’s not a whole lot of literature on it. I tried putting the pectin into the maple syrup and ended up with these huge, awful, doughy sort of pectin clumps.”

Eventually, she settled on a technique involving liquid fruit pectin. “It works very well and is much more seamless,” she explains.

Community Made

The jams are co-packed in Old Chatham, at Beth’s Farm Kitchen   now known as VFK, and distributed through a partnership with COARC—a partnership she’s particularly proud of. “We’re all about community,” she says. “That’s where all of my work, in different ways, ends up coming back to—building strong, sustainable communities.”

Wall Spitzer’s experience with New York Makers, an online marketplace and magazine she co-founded (and that is currently on hiatus), also helped shape the brand and provided the initial push. “We were talking to makers all the time, and when [a colleague] tasted the jam that she got for the holidays one year, she says, ‘We’ve got to make this for New York Makers.’”

Though she started small—jamming in her kitchen, sending jars to friends and colleagues, even enlisting the Governor’s Mansion chef to help keep up with demand—Spitzer Wall has scaled the brand with intentionality. “We don’t make that many batches. We kind of make what we have, then we try to sell that out, because we want to keep it as fresh as we can.”

Now available in shops across New York and Connecticut and online, Silda’s Jam isn’t positioned as an everyday item. “We don’t see ourselves as just being a condiment,” she says. “Because of the way we do our packaging. It makes a perfect gift. It’s kind of a special thing when you get it.”