In the fourteenth year of the Yong'an era of the Great Liang dynasty, Shen Zhaoning, the illegitimate daughter of the Chancellor's household, was forced by her stepmother to marry a sixty-year-old eunuch as a good-luck bride. She faked her death to escape and fled alone to the capital, where she took over a struggling little eatery and renamed it Golden Cauldron Pavilion.
She only wanted to live quietly off her cooking, but a dish of crispy pigeon drew her into a murder case. In court, she used her extraordinary sense of taste to identify the poison: it was hidden in the wine pot, not the food. By the next morning, she was famous.
The Vice Minister of Justice came to her door and offered three hundred taels of gold to help investigate the Consort's Blindness Case, which had gone unsolved for five years. She had no choice but to join forces with Pei Yanzhi, the cold and sharp-tongued assistant minister of the Court of Judicial Review, to find the truth hidden among food and poison.
As one dish after another was brought into the courtroom, she discovered that every case pointed to the same source: the Liu family, a medicinal cuisine clan wiped out twenty years ago. Her late mother was the sole surviving descendant of the Lius.
As long-buried imperial secrets gradually came to light, Shen Zhaoning finally understood: her sense of taste was no gift, but a curse; her existence was no accident, but the culmination of a sacrifice planned for twenty years.
Would she use these hands to cook, or to take revenge?
