Literary tastes

A chef from Chengdu has turned a dozen dishes from Cao Xueqin's epic novel The Dream of the Red Chamber into a selection of daring new desserts. Li Yingxue reports.

In chapter 35 of The Dream of the Red Chamber, when protagonist Jia Baoyu is asked what he would like to eat after being beaten by his father, he asks for lotus leaf soup.

It's one of the many dishes described in Cao Xueqin's epic novel, but it's unlikely anyone has ever tried to re-create these delicacies from scratch, let alone reinterpret them.

Not until now, that is. Luo Dan, a dessert chef from Chengdu, Sichuan province, has set herself to the task of re-creating 12 dishes from the famous novel and turning them into a range of daring modern desserts through an online course she developed called A Bite of The Dream of the Red Chamber.