Transmigrated to the Tang Dynasty: I’m the Cheng Household’s Top Chef

When modern celebrity chef Hao Jian wakes up, he finds himself in the early years of the Zhenguan era, in the body of a kitchen servant who starved to death at Cheng Yaojin’s residence.

The good news: he’s still alive. The bad news: food in the Tang Dynasty is practically inedible!

The ingredients are gamey and hard to swallow. The only seasonings are bitter coarse salt and sour, spoiled vinegar. Even the emperor’s meat tastes like rusty iron cookware. Hao Jian is distraught. How is a top chef supposed to survive like this?

To stay alive, he has to start tinkering from scratch. If he can’t cast an iron wok, he’ll improve the stove first. With no spices, he’ll substitute fresh flowers and herbs. The seasonings are no good... Wait, doesn’t he know how to refine fine salt?

When snow-white, clean-tasting fine salt appears at the Cheng residence, Hao Jian only wants to add some flavor to his barbecue. He never imagined that this little invention would astonish Cheng Yaojin, the fearsome Demon King of the World, alarm the emperor, and inadvertently smash the century-old salt and iron monopoly of the Five Surnames and Seven Great Clans.

From then on, Chang’an gains a cook who never sticks to his proper job:

When locusts swarm, everyone else frowns in worry while he sets up a wok and deep-fries them, making the whole court drool.

When foreign envoys arrive, everyone else shows off their dancing and military might while he serves up a banquet fit for an emperor, so delicious the envoys bow down in admiration.

When the aristocratic clans strike back, everyone else gets caught up in the political tides while he calmly works the wok in the kitchen, making thousand-year-old clans vanish without a fuss.

Li Shimin: “For your achievements, I ought to ennoble you as a duke!”

Hao Jian waves his hands hurriedly. “Your Majesty, there’s no rush to bestow an official title. The sea bass steaming in the pot needs my attention right this minute!”