Half a dou of moldy millet and thirty bowls of relief porridge. If Jiang Ning can't pay up, the local gentry will take her younger brother to settle the debt.
Transmigrated into an orphan whose kitchen was seized during a famine, Jiang Ning has no pocket dimension, no grain store appearing from nowhere, just a tongue that can pick out moldy rice and judge the heat, and hands willing to work over a stove. She saves the starving people of Qingshi Post with a pot of hot mixed-grain soup and takes back the ruined kitchen. Then she teaches the women to pickle vegetables, dry grain, and keep accounts, turning a barren village eatery that everyone looks down on into the most reliable source of food in the famine.
But grain merchants hoard supplies, gentry seize millet, and the accounts in the official granaries are falsified layer upon layer. Lu Chenzhou, the granary inspector who always invokes the rules to block her, finally admits after she brings him a bowl of hot soup: in a famine, making sure people have enough to eat is never a small matter.
