Zhou Yuan and his wife, Lin Xiu, run a spiced food shop with great effort, yet they are year after year subjected to financial demands under various pretexts by his mother and younger brother, Zhou Qiang. As Zhou Qiang's engagement approaches, the demands become increasingly outrageous, pressing them step by step from gold and jewelry to the banquet. Zhou Yuan agrees on the surface, but secretly has long prepared a thick ledger recording ten years of old debts. At the engagement banquet, Zhou Yuan publicly lays out every single receipt, bringing to light the truth of his younger brother's profligate ways. The bride's family angrily calls off the engagement, and Zhou Yuan completely draws a clear boundary. From then on, he and his wife cast off their heavy burdens, simmer the master broth of the spiced pot anew, steadily run their own little life, and return to peace and stability.