In the 14th year of Yong'an in the Liang Dynasty, Shen Zhaoning, the concubine of the prime minister's palace, was forced by her stepmother to marry the sixty-year-old eunuch Chongxi. She chose to fake her death to escape, fled to the capital alone, bought a small restaurant on the verge of closure, and renamed it "Jindingxuan".
She just wanted to live a stable life with her cooking skills, but she was involved in a murder case because of a "crispy pigeon". In court, she relied on her unusual sense of taste to point out on the spot that the poison was hidden in the jug instead of the dish, and she became famous overnight.
The Minister of Justice came to visit and asked her to help investigate the "concubine's blindness case" that had been pending for five years with a reward of three hundred taels of gold. She had to join forces with Pei Yanzhi, the cold-faced and venomous young minister of Dali Temple, to find the truth between food and poison.
As dishes were brought to court one after another, she discovered that behind each case, they pointed to the same source - the Liu family, a family of medicinal herbs that was wiped out twenty years ago, and her dead mother was the only surviving descendant of the Liu family.
When the dust-laden secrets of the royal family were gradually revealed, Shen Zhaoning understood: her sense of taste was not a gift, but a curse; her existence was not an accident, but a sacrifice that had been planned for twenty years.
Will she use these hands to cook or take revenge?
