Banh beo, the saucers Hue serves ten at a time

Banh beo arrives as a tray of saucers, each holding a white disc of steamed rice about the size of a coin, dusted orange with dried shrimp. Ten of them is an order, and the empty saucers stack up beside you as the count.

What is in a saucer?

Each saucer holds a steamed rice-flour cake with a dimple in the middle, topped with tom chay — dried shrimp pounded to a floss — plus crisp pork crackling and a spoon of scallion oil. A dish of thin, sweetened fish sauce comes with the set.

The cake itself is barely seasoned. Everything the dish tastes of is on top of it or poured over it, which is why two shops in the same street taste different.

The saucers are the serving dish and the measure. In the old Hue shops the bill is the stack.

How do you eat them?

Spoon a little fish sauce into the saucer, run the spoon around the edge to loosen the cake, and eat it in one. Then stack the empty saucer and start the next.

Banh beo needs no wrapping, dipping or assembly, which makes it the least fiddly of the Hue snacks. It is also the easiest to eat too many of.

Chilli goes in the sauce rather than on the cake. Ask for it separately if you want the heat, because the standard sauce is mild.

What does a set cost?

A saucer costs 3,000 to 8,000 dong, so ten come to 30,000 to 60,000 — one to two dollars at about 26,000 dong to the US dollar. Two sets and a plate of the other cakes make a light meal for two.

Restaurants serve the same cakes arranged on one plate for two or three times that. The stack disappears, and so does the reason the dish is charming.

The cheap eating guide covers how to read the gap between a house with plastic stools and a restaurant with a menu.

What else comes with it?

Banh beo belongs to a set. Banh nam is a flat rice cake steamed in banana leaf; banh bot loc is a chewy tapioca dumpling around a prawn; banh ram it pairs a fried base with a sticky top.

Ordering one of each is the normal Hue afternoon, and a table of four can work through all of them for the price of one restaurant dish elsewhere.

The street food guide covers the general question of eating from a small kitchen, which these almost always are.

Where is it from?

Hue, the old imperial capital, where the court kitchen habit of small, fussy, labour-heavy dishes survives in the street food. The Hue page covers what else the city does with that tradition.

Da Nang and Hoi An sell their own versions, generally larger with more on top. The further south the dish travels the sweeter the sauce gets.

North of the pass it is rare, which the city-by-city food guide records along with the rest of the regional map.

When do kitchens sell it?

The afternoon, roughly three until six, which is the single most useful thing to know. Banh beo is not a breakfast dish and the shops that sell it do not open for one.

The afternoon hours make banh beo the snack between lunch and dinner, eaten on the way back from the citadel rather than before it — a rhythm the two days in Hue route builds around.

Evening service exists in the tourist streets. It is fine, and the afternoon shops are better.

Is it filling?

A set of ten is a snack, not a meal. The cakes are small, mostly water and rice flour, and a hungry person will finish twenty without noticing.

Ordering by the set rather than by the plate is how the price stays low and the eating stays slow. Kitchens expect several rounds.

Pair it with bun bo Hue earlier in the day and the city's two most characteristic dishes are covered before dinner.