On a stormy night, food-delivery courier Wen Yanning falls through a crack in time and space. When she wakes, she is an orphan girl in a dilapidated house in an ancient county ravaged by famine. All she has is a chipped iron pot and a voice in her mind: [Take delivery orders and earn ingredients and cooking skills].
To survive, she uses her last half-piece of hardtack to make wild vegetable soup and delivers it to an old man at the mountain god's temple. Her first order earns her polished rice and the skill "Control of the Flame." From then on, she sets up a stall beside the blue-stone road. Her sugar-dusted osmanthus cakes sweeten the morning mist, her savory noodles leave even the pickiest scholars applauding, and her improved shepherd's purse wontons become the neighborhood's favorite comfort food.
When Prince Jing Xiao Jingshen first encounters her while secretly inspecting the disaster area, he sees her handing a hot bun to a beggar, flour dusting the tip of her nose as she smiles sweetly. Before long, the cold-faced prince becomes her most punctual customer. The bamboo slip he hands her reads: "Tonight, I want that 'Plum Blossom Soup in Falling Snow,' warmed to three parts."
The famine has not ended, so she uses grain seeds exchanged through the System to teach the villagers to reclaim wasteland, and uses her "Food Therapy" skill to ease the suffering of disaster victims. From a little stall no one noticed to a shop bearing the sign "Yanning's Little Restaurant," her hot meals bring warmth to years of bitter winds.
When rumors claim she is "using food to flatter the powerful and beguile the masses," Xiao Jingshen takes her dough-kneading hand and looks at her in the courtroom. "The warmth in her palm is truer than any rumor." This extraordinary culinary romance across time and space simmers in hunger and cold, bringing forth the warmest hearth and deepest affection.
