Dinner Is Served! [Food + Light Mysticism]

Upcoming: "A Little Snack Shop at the Song Dynasty Border" and "The Disfigured Actress" Blurb: Rural feasts, cooked for the living and the dead. A lighthearted slice-of-life story~ It's only natural that a female chef from the old era would be amazed by modern ideas, and that a modern villager would be stunned by the lost skills of an imperial chef! Gan Cui'er was born into a family of imperial chefs. But at the end of the Qing dynasty, her father was beheaded, and her grandfather spent the family's entire fortune to get her out of the capital alive. She had hoped to make a living with her family's cooking skills, but as a young woman, she was rejected everywhere. When a young master wanted her as a concubine, she could no longer even find work as a kitchen assistant. In the end, when thugs came to snatch her away, one of them accidentally killed her. As she lay dying, Gan Cui'er was filled with questions. Why had her father opposed the imperial court? Why, despite working hard and keeping her head down, had simply staying alive become an impossible dream? When she opened her eyes again, she had been reborn in a world nearly a hundred years later. Here, everyone could go to school. The land was no longer littered with starving corpses, women could hold office, and everyone could make an honest living with their own hands. So this was the future her father had died for. She loved this era. Gan Cui'er returned to her original body's hometown and went back to her old trade: cooking up grand feasts. Weddings and funerals, birthday banquets, promotion parties, graduation celebrations... or perhaps the mysterious feast of the Yellow Springs. Red-braised pork knuckles, diced chicken with chilies, poached pork in chili broth, red-braised carp... and tofu rice for the dead. The cooking that no one appreciated a century ago could finally shine among ordinary people. Hosts were proud to hire Chef Gan for their banquets, but it was somewhat troublesome that every feast drew strangers hoping to sneak in for a free meal. "I'm the nephew of the neighbor of your second grandaunt's nephew's daughter's boyfriend's aunt... Long story short, I'm really your relative. If I give you a gift, can I eat at the banquet?" As far as Gan Cui'er was concerned, everything about this era was wonderful, except that people were far too un-superstitious. Only the village's old men and women seemed especially fond of her. She could only secretly grab the young Taoist priest playing erhu in the wedding band and ask him, "Can you perform the ritual to break open the gates of hell for my father?" Zhang Mengdie, a Taoist priest who surfed the internet on 4G, blurted out, "Huh? What kind of filial daughter-father relationship is this?" Gan Cui'er nodded. "Yes, I'm a filial daughter." Zhang Mengdie looked at the now somewhat famous chef, at a loss for words. Isn't your real father working out of town? Why are you talking as if he's dead?! A warm slice-of-life story about cooking grand feasts, with a touch of the supernatural. This isn't a traditional food story: food is just a way to carry the characters' feelings. The heroine transmigrates from the Republican era to the present day, compares and experiences both eras, and gradually grows. *The male lead is Zhang Mengdie. Members of the Zhengyi Taoist School are allowed to marry~ Theme: The spirit of a new era.