Learning Day: Ambition's Potato (Patreon)

You know those terrible self-insert spy novels we find from time to time, where a writer creates an unstoppable meat wall of a man to punch his way through a mystery with no real conflict? Well, I found the lady version of that with a sexy chef; an Ina Garten Jack Reacher, if you will. It’s about a Tony-nominated actress who becomes British nobility by marriage, then a rich, famous TV chef. She has a house man, a Rolls-Royce, a boyfriend about to break big in his first Hollywood western even though he’s not a very good actor (he’s just that hot). The book is called Ambition’s Woman by Jeanne Jones, but it’s not the only book Jeanne wrote.

Jeanne Jones is credited with just two books on the Simon & Schuster website. I was reading the second book when I discovered 1981’s Ambition’s Woman, and I found the contrast between the two a little shocking because Jeanne left the glamorous world of a perfect fictional chef behind to write STUFFED SPUDS: 100 Light Meals In a Potato. In Ambition’s Woman the main character gets her Spud Stuffed several times but that’s the only real crossover.

Stuffed Spuds is about one woman’s descent into potato madness. Something happened to Jeanne. My theory is that she was trapped on an island sometime between 1981 and 1982 with nothing but a barrel of potatoes, and they became the Wilson to her Tom Hanks. It must have been a very brief stint on a desert island, though, because she wrote these vastly different books just one year apart. She could have been working on both at the same time. In 1981, Jeanne wrote about a power lunch between her main character, Lady Andrea, and her producer where they ate fresh Alaskan crab.

In 1982, she told people to blend pineapple chunks into a baked potato. The Pina Colada Spud, she called it. An “unusual and nutritious dessert,” she said and somehow no one arrested her for it.

Never has a woman fallen so far, so fast. The difference between 1981 Jeanne Jones and 1982 Jeanne Jones is so vast I now believe lizard people are cloning us and trying to take over the world. It’s the only explanation. The person who wrote STUFFED SPUDS: 100 Light Meals In a Potato had never tasted good food before. It’s the only explanation. Jeanne Jones has heard of good food that I didn’t even know existed, like a delicately fried croustade.

Yet, she’s going to try and sell me borscht spud! It’s an insult. “Make borscht spud yourself, you peasant,” I hear her screaming from the pages of her potato book. “Only borscht spud for the poors. Not even fresh beets in this recipe; just use canned so it tastes even more like dirt.” A slap in the face is downright polite compared to borscht spudding me. Eat a beet potato you fuck is an insult I would hurl only at a man who had kicked a dog in front of me.

Am I wrong to be offended by a woman whom I have written proof knows what flavors are telling me to blend beets and lemon into a potato and eat it? Maybe she had her taste buds burned off in a horrible accident, I thought, but no, she would at least have the memory of what enjoyable food tastes like. If she can describe the marvelously piquant contrast of flavors in Lady Andrea’s dinner in 1981, she knows what she’s doing to us in 1982. It’s a premeditated beeting.

Are there some more sophisticated flavors in Stuffed Spuds? Sure, not every recipe is written like a witch's curse. I might eat a beer and pretzel spud, or a pizza potato if I’m feeling crazy, but that’s food for the lower class, where potatoes belong. The problem is Jeanne Jones seeks to elevate the baked potato, and it doesn’t want to be elevated. The spuds are fighting her back.

I have to say Ambition’s Woman is not a bad book. It’s deeply weird but fun in a way that feels very reminiscent of soap operas of the era. The story opens with Lady Andrea arguing with her producer over her pay for her nationally syndicated television program. She’s about to receive an award from The Independent Broadcasters Association, and she wants an additional seven thousand dollars per episode, but her producer and ex-lover, Sid, threatens to cancel the show rather than pay her more.

Lady Andrea is worried she’s pushed too hard for more money even though she thinks she deserves it. We then get a classic '80s “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got in the situation,” flashback that lasts for basically the rest of the book. We learn Lady Andrea’s superpower is that she cooks really sexy.

Yes, this book is '80s horny. If you search for the word breasts, it’s only referring to chicken twenty percent of the time. There are sex scenes with erect nipples and taut buttocks muscles. Lady Andrea ends up with a man who has a dual-wield dick.

Would you expect this much deeply erotic soft core fucking from the inventor of the liver and onion stuffed spud? I wouldn’t think that a woman so firmly able to deny herself the pleasure of a good meal could even conceive of the concept of dual-wield dick. Yet here is written proof that such a woman exists!

Lady Andrea’s flashback of her life starts when she’s in a play at Northwestern University that goes to Broadway and brings her along as a lead actress. While making a film in London she meets an older British lord and marries him but their relationship fizzles out after she gives birth to a son with a hole in his heart who dies after a few weeks.

Lady Andrea’s husband, Sir George, is of “indeterminate” sexuality because bisexuality was but a whispered myth in those days, and before marrying Andrea, he had a younger lover named Riccardo, with whom he begins an affair while he’s grieving their son. When Andrea confronts Sir George about Riccardo, he’s so distressed that he has a heart attack and dies. I also became so upset I nearly had a heart attack and died when I saw her recipe for the peanut butter and jelly spud.

Sir George leaves Andrea with very little money, and she ends up starting her own catering company in LA to get by. This tragedy is what leads her to her TV show. She throws herself into work and forgets about falling in love until she meets a handsome billionaire named Hayes Caldwell, who eventually dumps her for working too much. She’s fine with this because she’s very busy being the world's hottest chef.

The final act begins with a navarin of spring lamb. Lady Andrea distracts herself with a catering job while she worries about her show getting renewed. She learns that a good write up of her catering company included a dig at a rival catering company owned by none other than Riccardo, her later husband's former lover. Riccardo shows up at the catering gig and implies he’s tampered with the stew, which sounds delicious in a way that makes me say, “Wow, a woman who creates a fictional stew this good would never also invent the Eggs Foo Yung Spud.”

Lady Andrea tells Riccardo that George never loved him. He only went back to Riccardo because he was grieving their son. Riccardo responds by trying to stab her to death in front of her catering crew and guests. A struggle ensues, and he ends up running away, falling off a balcony and impaling himself on a bronze fish statue.

It turns out almost getting killed in public by your late husband's gay lover is great for both your career and love life. The near death experience makes Andrea decide she can take Wednesday off on occasion for Hayes if he still wants her, which he absolutely does because she’s the orgasm chef. Then, after the story of Riccardo’s attempted murder makes it into all of the papers, ABC decides to pick up her show, and Andrea ends up making an extra ten thousand dollars per episode. It’s a happy ending! Well, for Andrea at least, not for anyone who bought Stuffed Spuds and tried the potato and raisin pudding spud.

Do you think the publisher demanded dessert spuds at gunpoint? That’s the only reasonable explanation for many of these spuds. I so badly want to picture the real Jeanne Jones as a glamorous chef fist fighting her husband's gay lover and choosing work over a man with a penis that would make her king if she pulled it from a stone, but I fear the later portrait of the sad woman blending cinnamon and nonfat milk into potato pulp and gnawing on it seems more likely. There’s only one passage from the book that gives me hope that Lady Andrea might exist somewhere inside Jeanne Jones.

At least she didn’t taste test the potatoes! She forced another woman to eat the potatoes. That’s dark. Recipe preparation and testing is all that’s involved in a cookbook, right? Jeanne Jones’s role in creating Stuffed Spuds is now unclear to me. Maybe she just cucked another woman out of her terrible cookbook? I think that’s what happened, and I’m landing on the idea that she’s a soft lit hottie who’s never eaten a potato in her life.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: John Minkoff, still trying to determine where the pina colada ends and the potato begins.

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