Red Mansion cuisine is based on the dishes described in Cao Xueqin’s 1760 classic, A Dream of Red Mansions, considered to be one of the greatest traditional Chinese novels. Food played an important role in Cao’s novel about a well-to-do scholar-gentry family, and there are more than forty honglou caiyao, or Red Mansion dishes, based on actual recipes recounted in the famous story. However, many other dishes were only sparingly described in the novel, allowing a lot of creative room for chefs to improvise