Ishtar Is Born...

This week's release of Peter Biskind's biography of Warren Beatty reminds us of a story that probably didn't make the pages...

We were working in the downstairs dining room at Babbo on New Year's Day, 2001, when a party of five walked in. During the pre-service briefing, maitre d' John Mainieri hadn't alerted the staff to expect either Beatty or Annette Bening by name, so it may have been as much of a surprise for him as for the rest of the staff and the guests when they showed up out of the blue early in the dinner service with a party of six. They were quickly shown to a table in our section, and we were particularly glad, even grateful, that through a rare and perhaps divinely-sanctioned change of pace, we hadn't made the usual wee-hours, restaurant-employee, booze-besotted run of the night before, and had instead gotten a good, solid rest.

Tony winner Judith Ivey and another couple (producers? old college friends?) were part of the group, which was very low-key and very relaxed. Neither Beatty and Bening were particularly dressed up, but neither were they dressed down. The talk at their table flowed at a steady pace for some time before they picked up the menus. It's always a little odd to watch a star actively reading a menu; the brief, necessary attention and concentration is like seeing them at work, watching them read a script. It's also a little odd to stand there and recite specials and answer questions. There's also the sense that a meal at a restaurant like Babbo, a meal that for many people might be a once-in-a-lifetime event, is for them simply a meal eaten in public rather than the privacy of home. For example, whenever celebrities are provided anything to eat or drink with the compliments of the house, they don't necessarily eat or drink it. With complimentary food, they might take a bite or two before returning to their conversation. But they can be confounding, even capricious. Just when it seems they're done, they'll take yet another bite. As a waiter, you have a communicate with the kitchen constantly, even more than usual, as starting the first course too soon or too late can throw the whole rhythm off. In good houses, there's usually a backwaiter or food runner especially deputized by the chef for communication. And when everything's working like it's supposed to, a restaurant feels like...well, like a talented group of ensemble actors.

Ms. Bening commented that despite the carbs, ordering pasta seemed the right thing to do. Once the order was out of the way, the group settled back into conversation. Bening was more of a listener, but Beatty was intently talkative. His intelligence was palpable, but not dominating. The party ate their main meal as unhurriedly as their amuses-bouches, and afterward picked for an unusually long time at an array of the wonderful desserts of the great Gina DePalma, Babbo's James Beard Award-winning pastry chef. (At one point, worried that the gelato was melting unattractively into the other treats, we asked Beatty if he wanted us to leave the puddled plate alone; somewhat loftily he replied, "I should think so.") When the bill was finally paid (by one of the unknown faces at the table), and the group began to gather their belongings, we mustered the courage to tell Ms. Bening that we saw her back in the mid-Eighties as Lady Macbeth at ACT in San Francisco. "Oh, no!" she moaned. "That was such a terrible production." "But you were very good," we assured her. "You and Henry Woronicz, who played Macduff, were the best things about it." "My gosh," she laughed. "How do you remember that? You must be an actor yourself." No, but we do like the theater...

We particularly remember the table next door. When the stars entered the dining room, the woman at that neighboring table blinked in recognition; while they were being seated, she took advantage of the rustle to lean forward and whisper excitedly to her husband. For the rest of the meal they could barely contain themselves, and we could tell that they were looking for some hairline-fracture opening to say something to Bening, who was closest. Finally their bill gave them their excuse. "Well, look at that," the woman said loudly, pointing at the date. "Oh-one-oh-one-oh-one..." "Well, what do you know?" the man responded. Bening turned. The woman, feigning the casual detachment of a customer filling out a deposit slip in a bank, repeated the sequence of numbers. Bening blinked, then, as comprehension dawned, repeated, "How about that? 'Oh-one-oh-one-oh-one'..." The couple nodded, pulled themselves up and out from their own table, and having obtained the kind of New York souvenir that usually only does come along once-in-a-lifetime, launched themselves into the night and the new year touched by the optimistic but glamorous thrill such an encounter provides.

Farewell, 2009...

Gotham Bar and Grill occupies an enormous space on East Twelfth Street in what is technically Greenwich Village. Not the fourth-floor walkup West, but the lower Fifth Avenue Village. Twenty-five years after its opening, a veritable millennium in restaurant years, Gotham retains a singular New York City sense of energy and spectacle. The high ceilings, the parachute-fabric-swathed lighting, the floor-to-ceiling windows--day or night it feels exciting to be there. Working at Gotham back in the Nineties, we encountered a lot of boldface names, although the restaurant rarely closed for a Page Six-type event. We were likelier to see Dustin Hoffman stroll in incognito like Ratso Rizzo in a rumpled trench to see if we were still serving lunch, or Robert Redford unassumingly making his way around the perimeter of the dining room to a quiet table in the back.

We do remember one red-carpet event from our days and nights on Gotham's checkerboard parquet: the Spring 1998 premiere party for the movie The Object of My Affection, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd. The movie, based on Stephen McCauley's 1987 novel about a pregnant women who becomes attracted to her gay best friend, pulled together quite a number of theretofore underappreciated talents: Hytner was fresh off his smash Lincoln Center Theater Carousel revival, and Rudd was skimming the first crest of a career on the rise. As for Aniston, in addition to Friends, still high atop the ratings, she'd recently scored a singular personal (and professional) coup: dating Brad Pitt.

Pitt didn't attend the premiere party, but there were the prinicipals and plenty of others to note. Bret Easton Ellis, an early arrival, made a beeline for the food. Janeane Garofalo jumped whenever we proffered our lighted Zippo for her frequent cigarettes. Amy Irving asked us not to poke her with the serving utensils, and the model Hoyt Richards looked surprised when addressed by name. As for the stars, we didn't see Mr. Rudd, but during hors d'oeuvre passage in the rear dining room, we noted Miss Aniston's near-empty martini glass, and glided over to ask if we could get her another. "Yes," she said, pausing Rachel-style to drain the contents. "A Cosmopolitan. But..." --she raised the index finger that had been wagged so often at Ross (and Joey and Chandler)--"...with olives." She smiled her crooked half-smile. "I know. You probably think I'm weird." Not at all, we replied, smiling in an understanding way. A girl who drank Cosmopolitans with olives? Way to go, Brad. We got your girl's back...

We remember this event not just because of the rare conjunction of so many celebs in the Gotham's loft-like space, but because the crowd was unexpectedly loose and easy-going. With not a little sadness, we particularly remember one late arrival to the party. She showed up around the time the DJ put on an uptempo remix of that season's smash single, Andrea Bocelli's Con Te Partiro. An actress from a movie we loved and will always love, Brittany Murphy grabbed us by the wrist as we were passing with an open magnum of Veuve Clicquot and pulled us to the center of the dance area. She threw down a few good moves, so we threw caution to the wind, passed the magnum to a backwaiter, and joined her for a scant but unforgettable moment during which we became an even-bigger fan than seemed possible by her now-legendary performance in Clueless. We know that few line readings will ever match up to the razor-sharp snap! in her comeback to Alicia Silverstone, "You're a virgin who can't drive..." We were particularly intrigued by online rumors linking her to an impending adaptation of D.M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel. Sadly, suddenly, we are now left, like others, wondering.

We'd like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the many bright spirits we said goodbye to in 2009. May they rest in peace. And to the rest of us, best wishes for 2010.

We Wish You A Merry FLOTUS...

A block off Dupont Circle at the corner of New Hampshire Street Avenue and Q Street sits the Women's National Democratic Club, a late-19th century Victorian building with Arts-and-Crafts touches. The Club, founded in 1922, is an historic D.C. venue for Democratic women that has broadened its affiliation over the decades to all genders, if not all parties. In 1994, as White House Chef on travel, we were responsible for a medium-high profile holiday event for several hundred-plus guests: the Christmas tea of then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Through the First Lady's sizeable staff, we began planning a month ahead of the event, which was scheduled for 4:00 p.m. on a December weekday. The main menu included traditional tea sandwiches such as cucumber on white bread and smoked salmon on rye, as well as savory profiteroles filled with chicken or egg salad; beverages included homemade fruit punch, as well as coffee and tea service. Pastries were prepared by the White House pastry chef. One of our significant responsibilities was making a gingerbread model of the White House. We were given plans for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue that allowed us to construct--and we do mean construct--a copy to scale that was about three-by-four feet. Ten days prior, the First Lady's chief of staff delivered a final guest count of 250 to us and to the Secret Service. In the meantime, we spent about a week building the gingerbread version of the White House in the club's kitchen; getting it to the display area was going to be another substantial undertaking.

Presidential- and First-Lady-level social events typically require a two-hour window of readiness on either side. The reason for the window on the "far" side of the scheduled time is the need for flexibility in such public figures' hour-by-hour schedules; we never knew what political urgency might necessitate the rare speeding-up or far more common slowing-down. Either case always required keeping foods at proper temperatures much, much longer than necessary--so long that the trick was planning and preparing suitable menus while maximizing flavor and texture. Fortunately, the First Lady's Christmas tea menu included foods served at room temperature.

The two-hour window on the "near" side was necessary for the Secret Service to come through the venue with a detail team, including search dogs, for their security sweep, and then "shut down" the required "perimeter". All guests, having already provided personal information for pre-screening purposes, began arriving an hour ahead of time in order to go through magnetometers. Once through, they waited for the First Lady's arrival. And waited. And waited. We weren't allowed to serve so much as a crumpet until she got there, which made for an awkward hour of social business indeed.

FLOTUS arrived by motorcade, accompanied by her sizeable entourage of staff, security, press corps, and other handlers. Once inside the room, she and her staff maneuvered strictly and entirely within an enclosed area that permitted both access to and protection from the guests. While Mrs. Clinton had access to all 250 guests, her staff had access to on-site briefs about each one. A pre-selected, pre-security-screened waiter from the club's staff remained at hand to serve the First Lady on the say-so of a staff member who shadowed her for just such purposes; he brought the occasional and somewhat obligatory cup of punch or tea sandwich to the First Lady's side. In all photos of such events, the ropes and stanchions defining this area are cropped out; at a state dinner like the recent and now-notorious one for the Indian prime minister, they are considered inappropriate.

It took about an hour for FLOTUS to make the circuit of the entire room. Once all the guests were acknowledged, the First Lady, still within the cordon, stepped to a podium in the vicinity of the Gingerbread White House to thank all the guests for their support of the Democratic Party. Mrs. Clinton was brought through the kitchen where, as was her custom, she personally thanked us and the staff; we always appreciated this touch of class. Then she and her team exited, as usual, through the venue's rear entrance, going back through the guests being out of the question. The guests remained in the reception area (typically, guests for presidential-level functions are held from exiting until the motorcade has cleared the secured area) and departed within a half-hour or so of the First Lady's exit.

What no one, not the First Lady, not her various staff members, and not one of the guests realized was that, while about a half-dozen people were in the process of moving the Gingerbread White House from the kitchen to the display area the morning of the event, the two east columns of the South Portico crumbled, resulting in the collapse of the entire portico. We finished moving the whole thing into place, however, and for the rest of the morning two chefs repaired the structure with Styrofoam and frosting. The Gingerbread White House remained at the club for the rest of the month. If such a confection is being assembled for the Obamas this year, we can't help wondering if a gingerbread version of Tariq and Michaela Salahi are positioned just outside that South Portico and are waiting to get in...

Cubanismo!

The Cuban artist Carlos Estévez believes “that works of art...are men’s supreme effort to conquer the universe.” Mr. Estévez, who was born and educated in Havana and still works and lives there, has a show up at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery called “Images of the Thought”. Earlier this month, we had the privilege of catering his opening reception.

The reception brought 200 people to the gallery, which is on the Main Floor of the UB Center for the Arts. As the guests arrived at 5, Mr. Estévez went through the galleries and briefly explained each work of art. He works in a wide array of mediums, from drawings to ceramics to painting to installation art. He has developed a distinctive visual lexicon that owes something to primitive mythology and cosmology as much as 19th and 20th century science. Human figures are prominently featured in his work; from a distance his canvasses, which have a somewhat neutral palette, resemble old-fashioned medical charts, like those used by palm readers or phrenologists. From mid-range to up close, the details in his work have the whimsy of Cornell, as well as the mandala abstraction of Kandinsky and Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes.

After Mr. Estévez finished explaining the exhibition, we started serving a buffet of Cuban specialties. We offered homemade beef empanadas, grilled eggplant on skewers, and plantain chips with mojo sauce, which is a light-textured, spicy citrus dressing, like a vinaigrette, that is common throughout the Caribbean (and allegedly originated in the Canary Islands). We made miniature version of the traditional Cuban sandwich with roasted pork loin, ham, mustard, and dill pickles grilled between bread. Lacking the necessary plancha that gives the sandwich its characteristic, panini-like flatness, we used a grill pan and weighted the sandwiches down under a baking sheet with a heavy, water-filled pot. Hundreds of guava-filled pastellitos were assembled and baked in advance by hand, and we fried up an enormous batch of savory, crunchy bacalaitos, a salt cod fritter. Without access to a good Cuban beer, we poured Corona and white wine and other soft drinks. We were pleased when the artist and many other commented on how authentic the food was; a Cuban émigré even mentioned that the bacalaitos were as good as she or her mother could have made.

“Images of the Thought” is up at the UB Art Gallery, on the UB campus in East Amherst, until mid-February 2010.

The National Bird

Thanksgiving Week reminds us that for several years back around the turn of the millennium, we prepared the holiday meal for members of the McCormick family, the Illinois-based clan descended from the early 19th century inventor of the mechanical reaper. Over the past two centuries, various McCormicks went on to prominent roles in American life, including Chicago politics and journalism. We knew Matt McCormick, who worked in high-end Washington, D.C.-area real estate, and over the years, he engaged us to cook and serve the traditional holiday meal in various residences in Georgetown, Kalorama Heights, and the Embassy Row areas for his parents and other family members.

After several days of preparations, as the guests entered the media room/lounge of Mr. McCormick’s residence, our assistant served Pimm’s Cups, Campari-and-sodas and Oysters Rockefeller. (The main event was adult-oriented; various nannies looked after the children.) Around four the adults moved the dining room and the huge, circular glass-topped table. Mary McCormick, Matt’s mother, oversaw the table setting, which included Royal Worcester china, Christofle silver, and Waterford crystal. Fresh flowers and votives completed the ambience while classical music piped throughout the house. At each place was a small, hollowed-out pumpkin with its lid. Then our work really began.

We’d prepared a soup with cooked fresh pumpkin, chicken stock, spices and cream. We called it a bisque although it wasn’t thickened with rice. Bringing the bisque just to the boiling point (so it would stay hot but didn’t curdle), we poured it into an enormous, hollowed-out pumpkin set on a ceramic serving platter. After pouring white wine for the first course, our assistant removed the lids from the pumpkins at each place setting, propping each at a just-so, Martha Stewartesque angle. We followed behind, lading piping hot soup into each. The assistant followed with a silver dish of homemade sage croutons.

After the guests finished and our assistant cleared and reset for the main meal, the two of us circled the table with platters of the traditional meal. One year we carved at table, but mostly we offered a heaping platter of sliced turkey or turducken with homemade cornbread or cornbread-and-oyster stuffing with individual hollowed-out orange cups of fresh cranberry-orange relish. The assistant followed with mashed Idaho potatoes—the McCormicks insisted on Idaho spuds put through a ricer—and giblet gravy. We continued to alternate with service of the various side dishes, including Grandma McCormick’s creamed corn pudding, mashed sweet potatoes baked en casserole with Bourbon and pecans, and fresh French-cut green beans with sautéed fresh mushrooms and a light béchamel. Once the entire menu was served, the assistant took over in the dining room with wine service—Mr. McCormick was fond of the wines from the Bourgogne region—while we refreshed each of the platters and quietly returned them to the table so the guests could help themselves to seconds.

Desserts included traditional pies with homemade vanilla bean ice cream and fresh whipped cream, served from the sideboard onto varicolored Limoges china plates with pewter scrollwork (which had to be washed by hand). Once the guests finished with dessert, some two hours after the start of dinner service, they adjourned to the living room for espresso-strength coffee brewed and poured from a silver coffee service, and served with rock candy sugar stirrers; Bigelow-brand teas were offered from a passed caddy.

We particularly remember that by Mary McCormick’s request, we passed assorted See’s Chocolates on a silver tray. See’s isn’t as well-known in the Eastern United States as elsewhere, and in certain circles the service of a domestic chocolate product might even be frowned upon. The late Claudia Cohen, for example, insisted on candied ginger and truffles from the famed Maison du Chocolate in Paris, and on the East Coast there are certainly better-known artisanal chocolatiers. See’s, however, uses E. Guittard chocolate—another Bay Area product—which is couverture-quality. This means that the chocolate has a higher percentage of cocoa butter, giving the end products more sheen, a mellower, creamier taste, and the distinctive “crack” when broken. See's Chocolates achieve a marvelous balance between American and European elements...much like that first Thanksgiving did way back in the early part of the 17th century.

Heart and Seoul

Stories about putting up grape jelly in Chautauqua County reminded the other Juicy Disher of putting up in the pantry on the other side of the continental United States--except that what was put up by the Gentes family was another matter altogether...

In 1970-71, our parents adopted three girls from Korea. They were biological sisters aged fourteen, twelve, and eight, all from the same orphanage in Seoul. The exact story of their relinquishment remains obscure, but has something to do with the father's coming down with tuberculosis, his relocation to the warmer, drier south part of the Korean peninsula, and the mother's being largely responsible for turning them over to the custody of the orphanage. In any case, our parents adopted the youngest first, and on discovering that there were two older siblings, cut through reams of paperwork and bureaucratic resistance to take the daring step of adopting all three, a decision unorthodox even by Seventies standards in California.

The girls brought Korea with them and within them. Whatever Korea was (and in many ways, the country itself was irrelevant), to us, the girls were Korea--its people, its history, its language, and above all, its food. Out went the creamed tuna on toast and stewed tomatoes of our mother's Midwestern background; out went the steamed clams and picalilli of our father's Francophone New England childhood. In came the rice, the bean sprouts, the lightly-cooked vegetables, the cellophane noodles, the dried fish, the exotic Asian mushrooms, the tofu. In came such oddities (to the rest of us, that is) as sungnyung, a beverage made by pouring water into a pot encrusted with leftover rice and simmering the whole like a soup; as with another other hot drink, the resulting "tea" is then sipped and savored...at least, it was savored by our sisters. Above all, in came the kimchi, staple of the Korean table, a kind of spicy coleslaw make from bok choy, sesame oil, rice vinegar, garlic, salt, and chili pepper. Lots of chili pepper. Think there's enough chili yet? There's not. With kimchi, like a pitcher's fastball, there can never be enough heat.

When the girls were still new to the country, our mother sought out the closest Asian market (this was the early Seventies, so it was still called the "Oriental" market) and bought some prepared kimchi. As soon as our sisters were old enough, however, they made it at home. They made it by the double-gallon in the largest mixing bowl in our cupboard, mixing the sliced greens with the requisite seasonings, adding so much red pepper and salt and garlic that the kitchen started to smell like...well, like a Korean household. The odors took over, and we American-born kids wrinkled up our noses at the prospects of all that "Korean cole slaw." Our mother was simply content to let the girls appreciate their heritage; our father, who appreciates foods the more idiosyncratic they are, couldn't wait to try some.

The kimchi had to be put up to ferment for a few weeks. We didn't have a basement or a garage--this was California, after all--so we put it up in the laundry room. As a family of eight (later, it became thirteen), we always had numerous leftover glass jars of all sizes--jelly jars, mayonnaise jars, pickle jars, and peanut butter jars. We had dozens of the latter with metal lids in a large two-quart size one seldom finds anymore. (Writing this, we realize that in this age of plastics and recycling, glass jars and metal lids have gone the way of the original Volkswagen, so the noise of the lid from a half-gallon peanut butter jar ringing on a cement laundry room floor has become a sound of the past.) Our sisters spooned the kimchi into the jars, topped each with a square of waxed paper, and screwed the lids on as tight as they could manage. The jars were put up in the laundry room to sit, and a few weeks later, the flavors, especially the chili, salt and garlic, had steeped, intensified. We kids...well, we didn't appreciate kimchi anymore than we appreciated tea made from water boiled after the rice was cooked. We tried it only because our father, as he helped himself to more, said that one should never simply categorically dismiss things without trying them first. We tried it; we just didn't like it. Fine, said our sisters, more for us. Which was equally fine with us.

Decades have passed since then, and even if we still don't appreciate kimchi, at least we appreciate the early exposure to such an exotic condiment. To be honest, we only have to imagine the sound of the metal lid of a peanut butter jar been unscrewed, and we can feel the crunch of the cabbage, taste the bite of the chili and garlic, the tang of the vinegar, the brine of the salt, and remember that we too, have our preserves...Seoul food, if you will.

Canning Time

Martin family life was farm life—genuine, largely self-sustaining farm life, with the bulk of the food on the family table coming from either our own farm or the farms of our Chautauqua County neighbors. We recently discussed the cost of food with Father Martin, who reminded us that the entire monthly budget for the Martin family averaged fifty dollars a month! Mother Martin therefore spent a good portion of the spring, summer, and fall putting up fruit and sundry items for the year. Because it’s October, we were remembering how she used to put up grape jelly.

Our cousins had a 175-acre Concord grape farm in Westfield, in the grape belt there along the southeastern shore of Lake Erie. The Concord grape, Vitis labrusca, is named for the Massachusetts town which also gave us the beginnings of the American revolution, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. Our cousins’ farm was part of the National Grape Cooperative Association which provides fruit for Welch’s Foods. During the year, the fruit from our cousins' farm had to meet Welch’s standards for pesticides, soil conditions, sugar content, and so on. In the fall, when the fruit was ripe and had the right sugar levels, a mechanical picker went through and harvested the bulk of the grapes. Back then, the picker wasn’t technologically able to harvest the last hundred or so feet on each row of vines, so those grapes had to be picked by hand. Each year, therefore, rain or shine, on the Saturday after the mechanical harvest, the Martin family gathered bright and early to strip what the machine had missed before the first frost came and rendered the fruit useless.
We met around seven or eight in the morning for a hearty farm breakfast: pancakes, eggs, sausage, bacon, and juice. Then everyone, nearly two dozen grownups and kids of all ages, headed out into the fields armed with pruning shears, toting carts and a huge assortment of plastic and traditional wooden bushel baskets. At the ends of the rows of vines sat these huge wooden boxes—each about twenty feet square—holding fruit the machine had already harvested. They were sitting there, waiting for us to clear the last, good fruit; once we were done, a semi would come and haul the fruit off to the processing plant.
Even when it was sunny, there was often a cool autumn breeze off of Lake Erie. More than once, we had to pick in the pouring rain. Picking the fruit was tedious, of course, so we kids inevitably made a game and a meal of it. We’d race each other to see who could pick the fastest; we’d drift off into daydreams while we picked the slowest; we got into grape-throwing fights. As the morning passed the kids’ mouths and faces and hands turned purple from the juice in the skins (even with black grapes, the juice from the pulp runs clear; you have to press the skins to extract the color). We stopped for lunch, then returned to finish the work. By late afternoon, we were tired and sore and sick of eating grapes, but for our help, we were able to take home about six bushels of grapes in clusters.

The next day, back at our house, we fought over which one of us kids got to work the 2-quart food mill, our home kitchen version of the huge presses at the Welch’s processing plant, while the others picked the grapes from the clusters by hand. Once the juice was pressed, Mother Martin would get to work making jelly, about seventy-five jars or so. The kitchen filled with the syrupy smell of grape juice, sugar, and lemon, and the steam rose from the gleaming surfaces of the Mason jars waiting for the cooked jelly. When she was done, we kids helped carry the jars downstairs to the basement (yes, more than a few jars met with catastrophe over the years), but we remember with great affection the sight of those shelves of brightly-colored canned vegetables and fruits, jams, jellies, juices, sauces, preserves, pickles, and relishes. Mother Martin passed this May, so in her memory, and in tribute to her, we present a version of her grape jelly that doesn't require the trouble we went to each fall, back on the Westfield farm.

Ingredients
3 cups Concord grape juice. (Note: you can use 3 cups of store-bought grape juice.)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon unsalted butter (this is what gives Concord grape jelly its sheen)
1 envelope pectin
4 cups sugar

Sterilize a dozen pint-sized canning jars, rings, and lids on the hottest cycle of the dishwasher (without soap), or submerge them completely in boiling water for five minutes.
While waiting for the jars to sterilize, bring the fruit juices, the butter, and the pectin to a rolling boil and stir constantly for 1 minute. Gradually add the sugar, continuing to stir until dissolved and skimming off any foam that comes to the surface.
As soon as the jars are sterilized, remove them with canning tongs, and fill each one with jelly mix, leaving approximately 1/4" space at the top of the jar. Using tongs, and working quickly, place the inner lid and the ring on the jar. Secure each ring; you can do this with your hands as long as they’re clean. Set the sealed and covered jars in several inches of hot boiling water for five minutes to set the seal (this time, the jars don’t need to be submerged). Remove the jars, and check the seal by pressing on the center of the lid with your finger. If the metal makes a clicking sound, the seal isn’t set; close any loose seals with a layer of melted paraffin. Allow the jars to cool overnight, then store in a cool place until ready.