Su Wan transmigrates into the body of a doomed kitchen maid in the imperial kitchens, with her head soon to be on the chopping block. Faced with an emperor whose palate is impossibly demanding and a crowd of senior cooks watching eagerly for her to slip up, she decisively tosses out the recipe book and serves up spicy hot pot, barbecue, and stinky tofu instead! The ministers kneel and beg the emperor to punish the wicked woman ruining the country, but he smashes his jade chopsticks. “If anyone slanders my cook again, I’ll send the lot of you to the border to chew bark!”
She thinks she’s secured the emperor’s favor, but then she catches His Majesty sneaking into the imperial garden to eat the pickled cucumbers she stashed away and drink her chilled sour plum soup. Su Wan says, “Your Majesty, that’s my lunch...” Xiao Jue’s ears turn red, but he puts on a stern air. “All under Heaven belongs to the emperor. Your food is my food.”
But when hidden arrows come at her time and again, Su Wan realizes that in the depths of the palace, her skill at spoiling the emperor’s appetite is both a shield and a death warrant. The bloody mists of the Yunhui case close in, and the difficult emperor’s gaze grows ever more inscrutable...
Is she a warmhearted palace chef who wins people over through their stomachs, or the surviving bloodline of a condemned traitor? In this game of survival, where the wok spatula is her blade and the imperial feast her battleground, can she cook up a way to stay alive?
