Shen Zhiwei, a food research and development supervisor, died suddenly from overwork. When she opened her eyes, she had become an orphan in a sauce shop in Qingshi Town, Great Li Dynasty. Her parents had died of illness one after another within three months. Her second aunt brought people to clear out the shop to pay off debts, leaving her with only her starving nine-year-old younger brother and seventeen coins to her name.
She brought out the abacus and turned the tables: "The things you took are worth one tael and five mace. You owe me two taels and one mace." They made a wager: within a month, Zhiweizhai would reopen, and she would repay the four taels owed, principal and interest. If she failed, she would give them the shop for free.
Everyone waited to laugh at her. Shen Zhiwei went to the stove and took out the old pot of master stock her father had left behind. She bought a bucket of pig offal for three coins, got fish intestines for free, and bought pig bones and skin for one coin. Then she started braising food right there on the street. The aroma carried halfway down the street. Dockworkers lined up, and students from the private school scrambled to get a taste. Zhao Jinbao, the young master of Zuixianlou, grew jealous and copied her menu to undercut her prices. She responded by setting up an open kitchen and inspecting the ingredients in front of everyone. When her rivals cut off her supply of firewood and charcoal, she turned the charcoal merchant into an ally. With the deputy county magistrate backing her, she fought her way from the restaurants of the town to the inns of the prefectural city, ultimately exposing a case of moldy military provisions.
The spice merchant Pei Yan offered three times her asking price for her recipes and was turned down. Shamelessly, he stuck around until he became her exclusive supplier. She thought of him as a business partner, but he used her shop as bait to draw out a hidden enemy. On the night her kitchen was sealed, Shen Zhiwei grabbed a rolling pin and blocked the doorway. "I risked my life for this shop. It's not one of your chess pieces."
From a vat of stinking sauce to a supply chain serving the imperial merchants, from seventeen coins to Shen's sign hanging all across Great Li, her greatest ambition in this life was to let ordinary people eat a dignified meal for five coins.
